What's up with Comcast-backed BuzzFeed? (Update 4/27: What's up with Vox Media?)

Tom Paine

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Update 4/27: Vox Media is reportedly living up to expectations, pretty much, and just made key CFO and board additions, Bloomberg
reports.

Last summer Comcast's NBCU invested $200 million in new media venture BuzzFeed, giving it a valuation of roughly $1.5 billion. A week earlier, NBCUniversal made a $200 million equity investment in a similar media startup, Vox Media. Comcast may not have totally understood this segment, but saw the growth opportunity it offered as attractive.

Of course, a few hundred million doesn't matter that much to Comcast. Just look at the $4 billion it funded former CEO Michael Angelakis' private equity venture with.

But BuzzFeed may be facing some tough headwinds. Today, the Financial Times reported that BuzzFeed missed its revenue target by 32 percent in 2015, and adjusted its revenue projections for 2016 from $500 million to $250 million.

Explanations offered by FT include custom content creation for advertisers taking much longer to complete than expected. Also, extensive video production in conjunction with NBCU has not begun to materialize.

Despite a reputation for having somewhat simplistic content, BuzzFeed has been investing in producing higher quality journalism. BuzzFeed, by the way, disputes FT's reporting. Its hard to say at this point, if the FT reports are accurate, whether this is an out of control startup, or a valuable company that's taking longer than expected to scale.

No word that I can find on Vox' financial performance, but it recently announced its first strategic partnership with NBCU,  an initiative to sell cross-platform, premium digital advertising.


Another view of the turbulance at BuzzFeed and
other new media sites.