Vivek Should Run BuzzFeed. Seriously.
The billionaire and former presidential candidate launched an activist takeover of the fallen digital media darling. Most of his points are correct.
Former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith published Traffic last year, and media pundits applauded the book despite, if not because, Smith posited that conservatives won the digital media revolution. Media reporters like Smith championed BuzzFeed, Vox, Gawker, Vice, Complex, and other digital content mills, but conservative websites won the Internet. Conservatives understood the internet was a digital tabloid, not some fancy, schmancy woke New York Times knock-off.
Smith wrote a great book. Most agreed with his premise last year, so I was puzzled to see journalists trolling Vivek Ramaswamy for his activist shareholder attack on BuzzFeed.
Vivek gave BuzzFeed several pieces of advice in his letter to the company. His chief complaint is that BuzzFeed employs too many people. He’s right. When I wrote freelance for various digital media outfits during college and into the mid-2010s, I watched once profitable entities take on hundreds of millions–and in one case, billions–of investment dollars. They hired way too many people, and profits vanished.
Unless you’re a cable news giant or one of the two remaining successful national newspapers, your media companies should maintain a handful of employees. You may make a profit as a mid-size company. You’ll burn cash if you try to act like a giant.
Sizes may vary. A Substack newsletter might stay profitable with nine employees, while another blog may earn profits and employ 50 people. But the 2010s digital media companies could shed workers. I hate layoffs, but the companies need actual restructuring—not a death-by-a-thousand cuts every few months but radical, literal restructuring of their operations. It’s the only path to profitability and survival.
Furthermore, they need to deal with the political times. Maybe there was a brief moment where far-left politics performed–emphasis on the word “maybe”; I’m old enough to remember when every men’s media outfit, except Barstool, pivoted to woke and lost their audiences–but the country is much more centrist. Americans like freedom of speech. Audiences are devouring tons of supposedly “problematic” YouTubers’ video podcasts as 2010s digital media dies. Diversity of viewpoints is good for business, so BuzzFeed should offer a diversity of viewpoints. Beyond good business, it’s the right thing to do. Diversity of viewpoints is as American as Elvis.
BuzzFeed would be lucky if Vivek took over the company. Maybe then readers would flock to the site, and the stock would pop.