BuzzFeed rode a wave of VC investment to become a force, but never found a path to profitability. Now it faces a fate like other failed digital-media darlings of the past.

In 2012, BuzzFeed was ready to take over the media world.

The irreverent news website had seemingly cracked the code for social-media virality, and would soon become one of the first digital-media startups to achieve unicorn status with a valuation of over $1 billion.

“The baton has been passed from print to the traditional web, and now from the traditional web to social,” BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti said at the time. “The entire industry is shifting, and we intend to be the leader in social publishing.”

Driven by such bombast, BuzzFeed (BZFD) became a digital-media darling alongside competitors like Vice Media, Gawker, Business Insider and Vox Media, as the industry rode a frothy wave of venture-capital investment to ever-higher valuations.

Fast forward to 2026 and, for many, the result couldn’t have turned out worse. Gawker was forced to shut down under the weight of lawsuits, Vice Media filed for bankruptcy and is a shadow of itself, and BuzzFeed now warns it could go out of business entirely this year.

“There is substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” BuzzFeed said in its fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday.

The company said it is “exploring strategic options,” to address its capital needs, but short of finding a solution, “we anticipate that we will not have sufficient resources to fund our cash obligations for the next 12 months.”

Earlier this month, BuzzFeed received a warning from the Nasdaq that its share price had dipped so low that the company in danger of being delisted. On Friday, BuzzFeed shares were up more than 4% in recent midday trading, to $0.75. The stock reversed earlier losses of as much as 7% to an intraday low of $0.66 cents, which was below its Feb. 13, 2024 split-adjusted record closing low of $0.67.

Peretti said on Thursday’s earnings call that he believed BuzzFeed was being undervalued due to a “pessimistic view” of digital media in general, as well as the company’s debt from its 2021 public offering and its pre-COVID real-estate commitments.

“The current market value of the company does not reflect the strength of our individual brands, the quality of our assets or the innovative work we’ve been doing to create new products with big upside in the future. In other words, we believe the sum of the parts is worth more than the whole,” he said.

People involved in building up the business say much of BuzzFeed’s troubles stem from its more bullish days a decade ago, when it was flush with venture money. Back then, the company said it was hiring a new staffer every single day to meet the demands of its growing audience and its thriving “native” advertising business.

“I actually think their problems are less about their business now and more about the overhang of a whole era in which investors and executives imagined a totally different cost structure for media that never materialized,” said Ben Smith, who built BuzzFeed’s award-winning news division and is now the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor.

In 2016, the company was valued at $1.7 billion following a $200 million investment from NBCUniversal (CMCSA) Through much of its heyday, BuzzFeed saw its revenue grow every year, but it could never quite close the gap on losses that ran as high as $50 million annually.

Then it went public in 2021 through a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) transaction, and things started to fall apart. Within its first year of trading, its stock price tumbled 83% and has remained in the low single digits since. It has more than once skirted the threshold for being delisted, and went as far as enacting a 1-for-4 reverse stock split in May 2024 — a way to multiply its stock price fourfold — to avoid delisting.

Ken Lerer, whose venture-capital fund Lerer Hippeau was an early investor in BuzzFeed and who served as the company’s board chairman until 2019, placed the blame more squarely on how the company was managed.

“They blew it,” he said. “Jonah had every opportunity to make it work, and he just couldn’t make it happen.”

In response, Peretti told MarketWatch: “The last few years have been bumpy dealing with legacy commitments from a previous era of media. But we always adapt and look to the future, and I’m excited about what is coming next.”

In 2022, BuzzFeed booked a record $437 million in revenue, but heavy debt loads and its faltering stock price forced it to shutter its news division in 2023, and sell off properties like Complex and First We Feast in 2024.

The company said late Thursday that 2025 revenue had fallen 2.4% from the previous year, to $185.3 million. Net losses widened 69% to $57.7 million, which BuzzFeed attributed to a “$30.2 million noncash goodwill impairment charge driven by a sustained decline in share price.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-buzzfeed-spiraled-from-a-1-7-billion-media-darling-to-the-brink-of-bankruptcy-95579e1f

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5845240&forum_id=2)#49740788)