Fifteen years after launching BuzzFeed, Jonah Peretti is heralded as a digital-culture visionary. He's also faulted for overseeing waves of layoffs and some former colleagues doubt his guru status.
Fifteen years after launching BuzzFeed, Jonah Peretti is heralded as a digital-culture visionary.BuzzFeed's widely-watched SPAC deal is being seen as a referendum on digital media.
Peretti, 47, has used his journey of discovery to become one of the architects of today's internet and accumulate immense wealth. He now stands on the cusp of closing perhaps the most important deal of his life: to take BuzzFeed public via a special-purpose acquisition company and fund an acquisition spree that could enable him to dominate the digital content of the future. valued at $1.
"There is a big question mark as to whether this works or not," one analyst close to those involved said."This isn't a no-brainer. This isn't a spectacular ride-off-into-the-sunset kind of a deal. It was probably their only option." "BuzzFeed is constantly experimenting with how much resource to put in or take out — they play fast and loose with people's livelihoods," one who was fired and who described Peretti as an"Emperor's new clothes figure" said. Another said:"When I see talk of BuzzFeed going public, it sickens me because we were all expendable to him.
At the outset of his working life, Peretti donned a shirt and tie, teaching computer science to sixth graders at an elite private school in New Orleans."His enthusiasm in the classroom was infectious," the man who hired him, Dale Smith, the head of Isidore Newman School, said. Their first creation was the"New York City Rejection Line," a calling card for fending off unwanted suitors. Next, the pair came up with Black People Love Us, a spoof website featuring a white couple named Sally and Johnny. Jonah later said that the Peretti family's racial diversity partly inspired the idea.
With money from Lerer and Johnson, Peretti leased a third-floor cockroach-riddled office above a mahjong bar in New York's Chinatown. It became a tech lab that would change the way the internet worked. But then, Peretti wanted to better understand news. He took journalists like Abramson to dinner to pick their brains."I remember one of his questions was if a reporter made a mistake in a story, whether The Times would fire him, and I explained to him that if there was an honest mistake, a correction would run or an editor's note, but it was not a firing offense," she said."He was interested in news ethics.
Following Facebook's lead, Peretti bet heavily on video, setting up BuzzFeed Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. It created stars from its stable of young video creators and took the idea of 60-second-recipe videos and turned it into a hugely lucrative cookery subbrand called Tasty. Today, e-commerce accounts for 17% of BuzzFeed's revenue and includes Tasty-branded kitchen knives and BuzzFeed-branded sex toys.
The following year, as Facebook shifted its algorithm away from news, Peretti began to look less like the great digital soothsayer."We were a boat on the tides of Facebook," one insider said."We would have good months and bad months, and no one really knew whether it was the content or an algorithmic shift."
As part of the SPAC deal, which it's doing with 890 5th Avenue Partners Inc., BuzzFeed acquires the publisher Complex Networks, a portfolio of sites that performs strongly with the under-24-male demographic.
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