What Ben Smith’s departure says about the future of BuzzFeed News

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What Ben Smith’s departure says about the future of BuzzFeed News

It’s one of those subjects that’s designed to excite the tiny community known as Media Twitter and literally no one else: a journalist leaving one high-profile publisher to take a job at another high-profile outlet. But since 90% of the people I follow belong to Media Twitter, then it was no surprise when my feed lit up with the news that Ben Smith, who joined BuzzFeed as its editor-in-chief back in 2011, is departing to The New York Times. And not as a high-level editor, mind you, but as its media columnist.

The response to the news was mostly congratulatory, but I couldn’t have been the only one scratching my head at the announcement. Sure, The New York Times is certainly a more established media outlet compared to BuzzFeed, but Smith was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, which is one of the world’s most recognized digital publishers and lands plenty of blockbuster scoops. Perhaps my perspective is way off, but this almost felt like a demotion of sorts, and it’s especially odd timing given we’re about to kick off what could be one of the most exciting presidential primary seasons in recent memory.

So here’s the question: what does Smith’s departure tell us about the future of BuzzFeed News?

BuzzFeed hasn’t made it a secret that its news division isn’t profitable -- in fact, according to a recent WSJ article, it’s the only division that isn’t profitable. A few years ago, it split news off onto its own web domain, and it relies primarily on programmatic advertising, whereas most other BuzzFeed verticals have multiple revenue streams.

A few years ago, Smith was rumored to be shopping BuzzFeed News around for a sale, leading some to wonder whether its parent company was getting tired of pouring money into it. Its layoffs of nearly 20% of its newsroom back in early 2019 only added to that speculation. Now, with Smith’s departure, it’s hard not to wonder whether significant changes are afoot. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that an executive’s leaving signaled a major upheaval to a media outlet’s structure and staffing. 

Of course there’s an alternative, simpler explanation for Smith’s departure. 

New York Times columns are sometimes described as a form of quasi-retirement, a place where veteran reporters get to shed the rigors of hard news reporting and embark on a career of armchair pontification. The job is cushy, pays well, and the columnist gets to write about whatever they feel like, with little pushback from their editors.

Smith just spent what had to be nearly a decade of grueling work operating what was essentially a startup. “I feel like he basically had gotten a little burned out on management,” a BuzzFeed source told Peter Kafka. “I think there are reasonable questions about why now, but I think it was inevitable that he wasn’t going to stick around.”

And now that he’s succeeded in building an impressive newsroom that regularly competes for the biggest stories out of Washington, I could see this as the perfect time to step back and hand the reins to a new steward. In his memo to staff, he wrote that he was “eager for a spell of writing and reporting and thinking,” and what better way to accomplish this than to inherit the column once penned by the late David Carr himself? There are certainly worse jobs in media.

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How YouTube’s biggest stars game its algorithm

Of all the algorithms that influence our daily internet browsing habits, few are more closely scrutinized than the one that governs YouTube. Through the homepage, the recommendations that appear on the side of videos, and the trending tab, YouTube’s algorithm has the ability to shower a video with millions of views and transform its unknown users into overnight stars.

It’s because of this very influence that so many people get angry about it. Whether it’s YouTube stars who are worried about their ability to reach their fans or liberal critics who say YouTube promotes right-wing extremism, there are plenty of politicians, journalists, and activists who are up in arms and ready to accuse YouTube executives of all sorts of nefarious evil.

But how many of these accusations are merely conspiracy theories born out of paranoia? To answer that question, I interviewed Chris Stokel-Walker, a journalist who covers YouTube for an online magazine called FFWD. Stokel-Walker and I went deep on the YouTube algorithm and the ways its biggest stars game it to their benefit.

To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. I also rounded up some of the biggest insights from the interview over here: [link]

Did YouTube and Facebook kill CollegeHumor?

Wired published a great deep dive into the history of CollegeHumor and ran through some possible reasons for its demise. Earlier this month, you may remember, the site’s parent company IAC abruptly sold it to one of its own staff members and announced the layoff of 100 employees.

The Wired piece was a nice trip down memory lane for me; I remember surfing CollegeHumor all the way back in high school, when it mostly consisted of just user-submitted photos. And there were all sorts of factual tidbits I was surprised to learn from the article. Did you know, for instance, that the site’s co-founders also founded Vimeo? I didn’t! Nor did I know that one of those co-founders now works as Facebook’s head of global creative strategy.

Anyway, a substantial portion of the piece is dedicated to identifying the reason for CollegeHumor’s collapse, and two primary culprits are fingered: YouTube and Facebook. 

Let’s start with Facebook. In the telling of former employees, Facebook, by prioritizing video and then grossly inflating the number of views for each video -- something it admitted to and for which it settled a $40 million lawsuit with advertisers -- lured publishers like CollegeHumor into moving their video distribution from their owned and operated sites and uploading them to Facebook instead, a move that generated absolutely no revenue for them.

Longtime CollegeHumor employee Adam Conover actually published an extended Twitter thread on this very subject back in October. “Instead of viewers coming to OUR site & seeing ads, Facebook’s model is to CHARGE YOU for access to your fans,” he wrote. “Site traffic plummeted. So did ad rates, and thus video budgets. Our FB views were awesome!! But we now know those were a lie.”

YouTube’s sin had less to do with distribution and more to do with monetization, especially after the adpocalypse -- the neologism coined to describe when the YouTube algorithm became much more strict in identifying controversial content and stripping it of ads. “If there was a swear, all of a sudden the algorithm would ping your video and there would be no ad on it,” a staffer told Wired. “So this video that you spent however many thousands of dollars on is suddenly not making any money.”

I’m inclined to push back on these arguments for two reasons. The first has to do with the fact that CollegeHumor operated under the media conglomerate IAC, which presumably has a substantial ad sales infrastructure. Couldn’t its ad sales operations been leveraged to sell in-show sponsorships so that the company was less reliant on Facebook and YouTube’s fickle advertising platforms? Plenty of YouTubers today diversify their revenue by securing these kinds of sponsorship deals.

But I think it’s also worth pointing out that CollegeHumor made a rather big and bad bet on building out its own paid streaming service. In its early days, it had embarked on a strategy that involved developing show ideas and selling them to larger video content companies like Hulu, Netflix, and Comedy Central. This is a strategy that several other digital media companies -- Vox, BuzzFeed, Complex -- have had some success with.

But according to the Wired piece, CollegeHumor soon abandoned this strategy. “Its success got executives thinking: Why cut other companies in at all, instead of bringing everything in-house and holding onto the IP? Why not go direct-to-consumer?” So it launched its own streaming service, called Dropout.

This was an expensive bet. It meant that not only did CollegeHumor have to fund its own content, but it also needed to maintain the expensive infrastructure and marketing of a direct-to-consumer platform. This is a difficult market for niche operators to succeed in; over the last few years we’ve seen the closure of Seeso, FilmStruck, and DramaFever, all streaming services that had a tough time competing with their much larger counterparts like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Let’s rewind the clock and imagine an alternate scenario where CollegeHumor kept 100% of its video on its own website and didn’t distribute to Facebook and YouTube. Would it be a thriving media company today? Perhaps, though I’m having a difficult time imagining how it would accomplish this feat. As an outsider, I can’t help but think that CollegeHumor’s downfall can be attributed to IAC’s failure to diversify the company’s revenue, and, at least in this instance, YouTube and Facebook are just the convenient scapegoats.  

Want to interact with me directly?

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Other news

A fantastic article about why hedge funds are paying billions of dollars to vacuum up the rights to popular songs. [link]

I find the idea of "content houses" immensely fascinating. Basically a talent agency throws a bunch of influencers into a house together, allows them to live rent free, and gets them to collaborate and cross promote each other's content. [link]

Vox Media is generating somewhere north of $10 million per year from its podcasts. It has 200 podcasts. That means it's generating around $50,000 per podcast. [link]

Several years after its launch, Facebook Watch is finally starting to see some homegrown stars emerge on its platform. Here's why they say they prefer creating for Facebook over YouTube. [link]

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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.