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Foreign.
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Hello. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Digiday Podcast, a show for anyone thinking of starting a digital media company in the year of our Lord 2026. I'm Kamika McCoy, senior marketing reporter here at Digiday.
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And I'm Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio digital media. Kamika, you know that 2016 trend from earlier this. You know who really would love to go back to 2016?
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The digital media darlings.
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Specifically those at Buzzfeed and Vox Media, because things were so much better for them back in 2016. So 2016, Vox Media had just closed a investment round where it was valued at a billion dollars. In 2016, Buzzfeed closed an investment round that valued it at $1.7 billion.
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B
I feel like you're about to give me some bad news.
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That is not their valuation anymore. So BuzzFeed just sold more than half of its company for $120 million. And only $20 million of that is BuzzFeed receiving now in cash. The other 100 million is deferred from for five years. And then just this morning as we're recording this, we were recording this on Wednesday, May 20, Vox Media has sold New York Magazine, which Vox Media acquired for $105 million in 2019, as well as its podcast network, which includes the podcast that it acquired through the acquisition of Cafe Studios in 2021, sold. So that's like half of the company sold for more than 300 million. So a better result than what Buzzfeed got with its sale, but still a fraction of that billion dollar valuation that it had 10 years ago. So we got to make sense of this. To do so we've brought on our media experts. We have senior media editor Jessica Davis, and then senior media reporter Sarah Wagliani. Jess and Sarah, welcome to the show.
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C
Hey, thanks for having us.
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D
Yeah, thank you.
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B
You guys have been more plugged into this space than I have. I remember the bulk of my 2016 spent on BuzzFeed News articles. They have got a very different landscape right now. What are you guys kind of seeing? It's another nail in the coffin for digital media darlings if the coffin's not already in the ground.
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Yeah, let's start with especially like Vox, since that one just happened this morning. Sarah, you've been covering Vox being based in the States and being in New York, where Vox is obvious based. There have been reports since what, late last year that Vox was looking to offload its podcast network. And then I think it was earlier this year where New York magazine got thrown into the mix and now both have gotten thrown into the mix and out of the company.
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D
Yeah, totally. I mean, my perspective, and maybe not everyone would agree with me on this, so I'm curious about you guys think too. But I really think that what Vox Media saw was an opportunity to offload at a time when it sounds like there was interest in their assets that have grown substantially, you know, over the last couple years and are, you know, profitability is one thing, but I think they're valuable media brands and assets. Right. Like Vox Media's podcast network is large, has some major names and podcasts in that portfolio. New York Magazine is another big portfolio of different brands that have different business models, commerce, advertising, all those things. And so I feel like with the valuations that have really sunk after peaks in the 2010s, with those valuations coming down to earth, I think this was really an opportunity for Vox Media to offload and make money while they could on their biggest and most valuable assets. At the same time, you know, I don't think it's necessarily a reflection of their businesses doing poorly. I think it was more of an opportunity that they saw, like, we have to do this now because the environment is changing rapidly around us. You know, I call it sort of the three S's, you know, this. There was a time when social search and scale were the three main things that investors, advertisers looked at when they were sort of looking at the quality of a publisher and how successful and healthy their businesses were. And those three things are changing rapidly with AI, with all the changes to search that Google is making. And I think seeing the writing on the wall, it was kind of an opportunity to get the most you could get out of these brands.
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Now, do we know how healthy Vox Media's podcast business is? What's its revenue? Is it profitable? So one thing that kind of colors my read on all of this. So Kara swisher, who hosts Podcast 4 as part of the Vox Media Podcast network, she was on Semaphore's media podcast, I think, last summer, if I'm not mistaken. And she talked about how Vox Media is going to need to sell off this podcast or have some sort of exit. I think she said, like within the next year or two. Otherwise they're going to owe. This is Kara Swisher talking. Otherwise, Vox Media is going to owe Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway a lot of money as part of their deal with Vox Media. So that's like, been in the back of my head as these reports have come out. Around Vox looking to sell its podcast network, that there was kind of a ticking, not a time bomb, but that there was a ticking clock to getting a deal done.
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D
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you know, the peak of podcast, you know, revenue, I think, you know, that bubble burst, right. Like, we've written stories about that as well. So that does make sense to me too. From, you know, I don't have numbers, but from conversations I've had with folks at Vox, it seemed like the podcast business was healthy, but it makes sense that maybe there was. You know, again, I think it was kind of like seeing the writing on the wall that only, I think, contributes to that, where maybe there was some kind of tipping point where they're like, now's the time to sell. It's a good time to get out. Let's figure out how much money we can actually make from these businesses.
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And Jess, I'm curious, like, your thoughts on what got sold or is getting sold. This deal still has to close, but is expected to close, I think in the coming weeks. So pretty soon. But. So Vox Media is selling New York Magazine, its podcast network, and Vox.com is also included in this. And so they're going to Lupus Systems, which is owned by James Murdoch, one of the children of Rupert Murdoch. Jim Banoff, Vox Media CEO, is also going to Lupa. What's remaining then is some of the former Vox Media assets. So namely the Verge and Eater and Ryan Polly, who I believe is president of Vox Media, is going to be overseeing those. So it's not just New York Magazine, it's not just the podcast network. It's also vox.com and also, like, it's not just the podcast network being sold, it's New york magazine and vox.com, which are probably two of. Definitely two of the bigger or well known Vox Media publications, if not the best known. No, I know the Verge really well, but I'm super into tech, so that explains that. Jess, what do you make of what Vox Media has sold here and what they're keeping at the. Like they haven't named the new company. Hopefully it's something better than Versant.
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Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, I think what's interesting about this is just that when you talk about potential asset sales, the New York Magazine, which does have really strong, you know, they've got. They've got what they got. They got Vulture, the Cut, right? Intelligenza, they're all very distinct high value brands. And the podcast network, I mean, it is a real revenue engine. In a way, you know, in 2025, I think the New York Times reported that it did make 80 million in revenue. So it's not just an experiment. You know, there's something valuable there. And what's really interesting, I think just sort of looping back to kind of how you, how you kick this off, you and Kimiko. You know, 10 years ago the logic was build a, you know, a giant scaled digital publisher. And now the market is increasingly asking sort of which individual brands, I guess personalities and content franchises actually have the durable audience relationships and that monetizable ip. So if you look at, you know, some of the brands that they have within that group, I do think that brands like the Cut or, you know, Vulture, they do travel across platforms in a way that sort of just digital, you know, generic digital scale sort of increasingly doesn't. So I do feel in a strange way, I mean, as Sarah said, maybe they did it before, you know, the value dropped further. But it does kind of to me look interesting in terms of how digital media companies are now being valued. They're being looked at not these suits of one umbrella brand, big sort of volume traffic buys. They're being looked at as individual assets and how those can sort of be stood up to withstand the current or the next phase of challenges, which is obviously AI and everything. So this deal, to me sort of seems or feels a little bit like a snapshot of where digital media may be going next. It's away from valuing bundled traffic machines, which is what a lot of these companies were back in a decade ago, and towards valuing distinctive media assets that can survive in a world really where platforms and AI are weakening the importance of homepage traffic just generally and SEO generally. So that's my take.
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Yeah. Although it's interesting because that was especially at Vox Media. I remember interviewing Jim Bankoff. This would have been 2012, 2013, maybe around the time it acquired Vox.com and he talked about wanting to effectively build a house of brands, something along the lines of what you had at the time with Conde Nast and Hurst and still do had at the time at Time Inc. Which no longer exists in its previous incarnation. But we will be getting to where Time Inc. Kind of is now. So having strong brands was always the idea. But it seems like the brands that have persisted the most or kind of weathered the storm of the past year, 10 years, the best have been the traditional media brands. New York Magazine, the Cut, and kind of its sub house of brands are the ones that still last. Arguably the strongest brand of the digital media era of digital media publishers in the past 10, 15 years was Buzzfeed. Kimiko, you mentioned Buzzfeed was a big thing for you.
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Was is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, Tim. I think it's interesting because the point that you guys bring up about having like, the name recognition, right, Having the bespoke ip and then also, like, their podcasts were strong contenders and like, making it so that box walked out with, like, you know, not the. The best, or is walking out whenever this deal closes, is walking out with maybe not like the creme de la creme of deals, but they're not taking the short end of the stick in the grand scheme of how these deals go, buzzfeed seems like it is not only is there, like a payout over time, but, you know, its valuation is a lot different to the point that Tim brought up the numbers earlier. And then on top of that, like, what is their offering, I guess, is essentially what I'm asking at this point. They got rid of their bespoke hard news years ago, and I think Paretti is.
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Well, they still have HuffPost, but they got rid of BuzzFeed News, the one
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that was winning awards and PR. Yes. I'm assuming that AI has, like, really cut into how much, like, how valuable their. Their quizzes are and their E commerce. And then on top of that, like, a lot of the creators that kind of became their front faces are now gone, have gone to their other things. So, like, what's left of BuzzFeed at this point?
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They also sold Complex, which they had acquired for $300 million, and then used that to go public via SPAC IPO at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Complex is gone. First we feast is gone. Hot ones gone is gone. And yes, Sarah, what is BuzzFeed currently?
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I think that's the problem, really. You know, when I talked to analysts for the story that I did on buzzfeed sale, that was one of the major points that they brought up, which was what's left? You know, I mean, they sold off their most valuable assets in order to have some cash on hand in order to push for profitability, because as all of these shifts were happening, investors were looking for profitable, durable businesses. And in order to push for that, they had to sell, you know, they had to shutter BuzzFeed News. They had to sell Complex because, you know, they were basically at a penny stock by that point. So by shedding off all of those major assets, it's true. What is left? Not much. I mean, like you said, there's HuffPost. I mean, BuzzFeed still has a lot of brand recognition. That was kind of the biggest thing that investors and analysts told me, which was like their name buzzfeed, everyone knows, and that's really what their value is. But beyond that, like, sorry to say it, but it's not BuzzFeed's, you know, the core brand. It's not their content, it's not their business model right now. It's not their AI innovation as much as Jonah Peretti, their CEO, has been trying to push for that. Former CEO Sarah.
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What is that about? So BuzzFeed has its new fronts. Presentation, I think, was where it announced this stuff back in March. It has some AI game called buzzfeed island or BF Island. What is. What's that?
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D
I don't know. It's a bunch of apps that use AI to create content in like a social environment. And, you know, I think it's a unfortunately good example of a company, a media company, trying to push into the AI era by creating products that are powered by AI that nobody really wants or uses. And, you know, I understand the need to try to become more of a tech company. Right. We talk about this all the time at Digit A R Reporting, like when meeting media companies try to become tech companies. And I understand the need for that because, you know, maybe they'll attract some more investors. Like, maybe it'll, you know. But the problem is it's not products that people want. Right. I mean, I haven't seen anything about the user base for these apps, like the announcement about this. I think they worked on these products for like two years and, you know, it kind of landed very flat. And so, yeah, going back to your question, what, what's left of BuzzFeed? Not much. And I think that was the problem with buzzfeed trying to continue to operate as a business, is that they just needed a lifeline. And Byron Allen, who invested, you know, the 120 million in Buzzfeed, gave them that. But when you hear what he wants to focus on with buzzfeed, it's about video, you know, it's about streaming, it's
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about all these competing with YouTube.
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Right. I'd love to hear your take on that, Tim.
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Yeah, it's about, you know, trying to,
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I think is not gonna a hut.
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Well, you've sold off everything that could have potentially competed with YouTube, like first week feast and hot ones and things like that. What is then left to then take into a. I don't understand the logic here.
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Yeah, I, I Don't know, I'm, I'm curious to see what happens because it's a lofty idea and, you know, we might all be proven wrong. Maybe something amazing will come out of it, but it seems like a very uphill battle.
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Yeah, I mean, the fact that YouTube has usurped Netflix as the most watched streaming service on TV screens, I have a hard time imagining this future incarnation of buzzfeed that like Kimiko mentioned, lacks the talent the video IP that it once had with Hot Ones or even, you know, previous to that. Michelle Carre the try guys. Like there were major creators that started at buzzfeed that have gone on to run seemingly successful businesses on their own outside of BuzzFeed. And now what BuzzFeed has left is an advertising business that's struggling. Ad revenue is down 20% to $17.1 million in the first quarter of this year. Content revenue was up 69% to $7.5 million. But then it's commerce business, which at one time was a highlight. Like I remember when a lot of publishers were getting into commerce, they looked at BuzzFeed as, oh, that's the model that's we have to figure out what they're doing because it seems to be working for them. Commerce revenue down 32% to $6.9 million in the first quarter this year. And what's left is this AI games business, which seems to be Jonah Peretti. Like a lot of publishers looking at the New York Times and what New York Times has with wordle and its games and being like, okay, how can I do that but throw AI at it and that's going to be the future of media. Just what do you make of this AI game strategy and how buzzfeed, like other publishers, is trying to figure out how to survive and hopefully one day thrive again in what's becoming this AI era of publishing.
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C
Yeah, I mean, in a way it kind of to me seems quite on brand. You know, BuzzFeed sort of built its, its name really from chasing trends. You know, we kind of touched on how obviously they did have a really well respected investigative journalism output at one point, you know, award winning. But ultimately they, they did chase after the viral hits and that's how that's what they based everything on. And obviously once the distribution platforms shift, we all now know what a disaster that is if you're over reliant. So the AI thing to me seems a little bit just in terms of how that first presentation went down, which was not very well. It kind of feels a little bit like the same thing, sort of attaching AI to something and thinking, hey, this will be the new thing that everybody wants. And as you say, tapping into that gaming income that all the, all the publishers are now chasing. The New York Times sort of games kind of word or model, because it's so effective and for many reasons, it builds them out beyond news, which is good for advertisers as well. But this sort of AI, I mean, I have a lot of conversations just around generally how publishers are sort of integrating AI. And the thing that comes up a lot with people who are a lot more sort of tech savvy than me and a lot smarter about actually creating these products is just that the tech itself is kind of already a commodity. It's the business model, the business strategy that needs to be thought about and how AI can enhance that. And it may sound like a basic thing, but when I see things like this, it makes me wonder whether they're looking at that the right way around. So, yeah, you know, but we'll see. I mean, I was interested to read an article, Jonah Peretti saying he was, he was more comfortable as a tech, you know, CEO than a media CEO. And so we'll see how that shakes out. But at the moment, yeah, it didn't have the best kind of start that did it. And the YouTube, the. I mean, I don't know that the YouTube kind of rhetoric for me is like, you've got to say something at these big announcements. You've got to come out swinging big punches, right? You've got to. So they've got to say something, but
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with some, with some, some solid foundation because otherwise it just sounds like, oh, no.
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Yeah, you know what that is? That's actually a really good point. It sounds, it sounds a bit disillusioned
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just on stage yapping.
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It doesn't give you. Yeah, it doesn't give you the best confidence, does it? But, yeah, we'll have to see. But I think it feels a little bit like they of the peers, you know, that we're kind of discussing here, you know, Vox and you know, people in Kairno will come onto as well. Like, feels like BuzzFeed sort of, to me at least, kind of clung on a bit too long to their way of doing things and sort of, you know, even if you just look at the site now, like it's the content on there, it's like, what? You know, I don't know. I mean, I remember, I don't know if you had this Kimiko from covering them like for a long Time. But I just, I still think of this moment, even though it's obviously just a very subjective moment. But I remember at the time thinking when I was watching this, you know, Facebook live stream, which was apparently just blew, blew the top off everything that day. You know, watermelon elastic bands being put around a watermelon.
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Yes.
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To see if it explode. 900,000 views. I had to look it up because I was like, how much did that actually get? 900,000 concurrent views. And even then. And I'm a millennial, which obviously they were targeting, but I'm obviously an old millennial because I was looking at it, thinking, I don't get it, I don't get it. But they're obviously onto something, you know, and just how different that looks now. But we were all. My point was that we were all high off that at the time. It's kind of, it's easy to look back now and say, how ridiculous. But at the time they, they genuinely looked like the future of media. You know, they weren't fringe experiments at the time. And they did, they did anticipate and respond to younger audience desire, you know, for how they consume the news. And honestly, they have trailblazed a lot, you know, that's still relevant now. People don't want to be, you know, there is a malaise, or there was a malaise for sure, around how younger people kind of consumed legacy news. And so they did do a lot there. It's just that obviously the economics underneath all of that turned out to be not very durable. But my point being in a long winded way that everyone, the market too misunderstood it. You just have to look at those wild valuations. Everyone was kind of high on that distributed scale sort of model and how we could all learn from it and monetize from it.
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A
But yeah, obviously, yeah, because the lesson of all of this seems to be that the digital media brands were never the hope. And kind of the promise was these are the next generation of Conde Nast, of Hearst, of Meredith, which is the magazine conglomerate that dot-onlyly about.com had acquired and Meredith had previously acquired Time Inc. Another of these big traditional media conglomerates. And that acquisition seems to be why Meredith renamed People Inc. Is not only surviving, but seems to be in a much better position to the point where its parent company, iac, just within the past few weeks said, actually we're going to just call ourselves People Inc. Now, why is it that People Inc. Seems to be headed in the other better direction than BuzzFeed and Vox Media? Or is it like maybe that it seems that way, but perhaps the other shoe hasn't yet dropped. With People,
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C
I mean, yeah, we grouped them together for obvious reasons, but actually they were sort of making quite different bets, I think, in terms of how digital media would turn sort of audience scale into a business. And I think those differences are kind of more and more clear as all of these kind of developments have happened. And People Inc. From my understanding, this is probably because my daughter makes me play hare and the tortoise in role play like almost every day. So it's an analogy that's top of mind all the time. But if we were to compare all of them, I would say that People Inc. Felt a bit like the tortoise and the Buzzfeeds and, you know, the voxes were the hares. And I just think that it's had a more methodical approach. You know, it may have seemed like the slightly less kind of maybe over the years the slightly less glamorous or sort of flashy kind of one in comparison to those. But now from what I see and from listening to their earnings calls, we talk with people there as well regularly, it feels like they have cottoned onto something. They just did a lot more work, I think, around building monetization layers off predictable demand rather than these volatile things. So how do you take a known audience and make more money per user through commerce, affiliate revenue and a more disciplined kind of ad product, I guess, than just sort of chasing scale. So, yeah, I personally think that they might have won that last cycle in that sense.
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A
It definitely seems like they had the best acquisition of the lot because they acquired a whole host of publications with like very strong brands. I mean, you have People magazine in there, you have Food and Wine, you have Southern Living. But also these are media properties that, yes, they have like web businesses. And then that was like a big part of the value of dot dash Now People Inc. Acquiring the Meredith Publications is they were able to really create digital presences for these traditional media properties. But these are also traditional media properties that have businesses beyond digital media. They have big licensing businesses, they have big event businesses. They have, I mean, print businesses aren't doing fantastic like that. Revenue is down, but that's still helpful revenue to have. So People Inc. Also seem to be less exposed to a degree to Facebook distribution changes and social distribution changes in general and more recently, search distribution changes where they have been hit by that. Like People Link's ad revenue was up by 1% in the first quarter of 2026, but it noted that impressions were down and that the impressions were down because of Google search changes and AI overviews eating into search referral traffic. But Sarah, what do you make of People Inc. Having acquired the Meredith Properties that have these businesses that are less reliant on the web or less solely reliant on the web than what buzzfeed and to an extent, Vox Media had with the acquisitions they did?
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D
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you really hit the nail on the head there is that they had much more diversified businesses because of the acquisitions. They, you know, maybe the brands weren't as sexy as some of the other ones, but they had, you know, strong licensing, you know, partnerships, subscriptions, even commerce. And you know, People Inc. Has talked a lot about over the years trying to grow their, they call them sessions. So basically, you know, grow their revenue that's not based on, you know, sessions to their sites. I think they said in Q1 that non session based revenue had grown 24% year over year and that that, you know, share of revenue had grown in terms of their total digital revenue by 41% year over year. So a larger share of their digital revenue was coming from revenue not based on traffic essentially to their sites. And then that share of revenue was growing. That revenue itself was growing too. And so I think it's just an example of the company really prioritizing growing, you know, revenue that's not dependent on traffic at a time when traffic is a huge challenge for publishers. And I think they're able to do that because they have, you know, like I said, strong licensing, commerce, subscriptions. They've also been kind of ahead of the game with some of these AI licensing deals and marketplaces. You know, not a lot of revenue is coming from that. But I think it does show that they've been, you know, thinking about the future in a way that maybe some of these other companies that we're talking about, you know, we're a little bit slower to do. And because of that, they've ended up in a, you know, more comfortable place as a digital media company in this, you know, tough environment.
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A
Kamika. So I guess to answer that, you know, you've posed at the start of this episode, a podcast for anyone looking to start a digital media company in the year of our Lord 2026. It seems like step number one, acquire an old media company.
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B
Correct?
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D
Legacy brands. I mean, Ziff Davis did this, right? They bought a bunch of legacy brands from recurrent ventures, I believe.
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Yeah, but it was like what Dwell
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magazine, well, Popular Science, which is, you know, 100 plus years old but yeah, you're right.
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I mean, so is their readership.
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D
I think maybe that's a bad example, surely.
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C
I think it's reassuring. It's a nice thing. Legacy publishers need some. You know, there's always some, like, horrific disaster going on in the background. Like, why not? Legacy publishers are back. I just wanted to add to what Sarah was saying, like, something that just. I feel like they're very good about sort of getting their narrative on this in their earnings calls. People Inc. The last couple, it really seems to me like they're sort of positioning themselves like, not as a magazine group anymore, but like as an IP engine. You know, the brands, they're not just content anymore. You've already sort of referenced there anyway. They haven't been for a while. But, you know, their products, their experiences, their data businesses. And crucially, and they do hammer home home this every time. They're not reliant on Google clicks and Google links generally. And that was a disaster that they say that they saw years ago, almost three years ago. So they've been working hard, as Sarah said, to kind of reduce that reliance. But I just think that that in itself, the creation of the IP and then sort of locking that up, obviously sort of creating these franchises, I just think that that's going to be an interesting one to play out.
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A
Yeah. Especially when you have Conde Nast CEO Roger lynch, who was talking, I think it was tvpn, about how he's already late last year he instructed his leadership to set their budgets with the assumption that they will be getting zero traffic from Google going forward. So maybe Kimiko, what we'll need to do for a part two of this is a look at the legacy publishers like Conde and Hearst.
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B
I 100% agree. But in the meantime, thank you so much, Jess and Sarah, for joining us.
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D
Thank you.
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C
Of course. Thank you.
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A
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Digiday Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening. Get more from Digiday with our daily newsletter sent out each weekday morning. Visit digiday.comnewsletters to sign up.