BuzzFeed bet on AI to rescue itself. This week it laid off another third of its staff. The bet, it turns out, was never the thing that could save it.
The company cut about 180 jobs on Monday, roughly a third of its remaining workforce, the New York Times reported. The cuts hit the news site HuffPost, the recipe brand Tasty and BuzzFeed’s film and TV studio.
They are the first big move by Byron Allen. The media mogul took a controlling stake in May and became chief executive.
A cost cut, not a robot takeover #
It is tempting to read this as AI replacing writers. The fuller picture is simpler, and bleaker. Allen bought a company drowning in debt, one that had warned investors it might have to halt operations.
He is now cutting to stem the losses. BuzzFeed expects about $32m in annual savings from the layoffs, the Hollywood Reporter reported, and its ad revenue fell nearly 20% year on year. This is old-fashioned cost-cutting at a shrinking company, not an automation story.
The AI pivot that didn’t save it #
The AI bet is real, though, and it has not worked. Founder Jonah Peretti went all in early, announcing in January 2023 that BuzzFeed would use ChatGPT to help make its quizzes, Futurism noted. The stock briefly jumped.
Then the company was caught publishing AI-generated articles riddled with errors, and it shut its Pulitzer-winning news division the same year. Traffic collapsed, and the share price fell from around $4 to under 50 cents.
Peretti has since stepped aside as chief executive to run a new AI unit, chasing apps like his “BF Island” project.
Now AI is the threat too #
Here is the irony. The same technology BuzzFeed is betting on is squeezing the whole industry. AI systems scrape publishers’ work to answer questions directly, then cut the traffic that paid for it.
Publishers are fighting back, and chasing streaming deals to reach audiences the old platforms no longer send their way.
BuzzFeed’s real killer was always distribution. Facebook made it a giant last decade, then stopped sending readers. Its dependence on platforms it could not control is the story of its rise and its fall. That meant social feeds a decade ago, and now the terms set by tech giants.
The AI turnaround was a bet that this time would be different. So far, it has not been.
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