BuzzFeed and HuffPost will now operate under the same umbrella after HuffPost was sold by the previous owner, Verizon Media.
The sale included an all-stock deal and puts two major players in online media into the same ownership.
Verizon Media will stay involved with BuzzFeed and is investing in it to become a minority shareholder.
This new deal also includes an agreement between the two media entities to syndicate content.
They will also work with one another on advertising as well as work hand in hand in helping each other monetize.
In some ways, the deal completes the circle and is a logical pairing. The current CEO of BuzzFeed, Jonah Peretti, was actually one of the co-founders of HuffPo (formerly known as The Huffington Post).
This means the transition should run much more smoothly with Peretti’s knowledge of both companies.
Peretti noted, “I have vivid memories of growing HuffPost into a major news outlet in its early years, but BuzzFeed is making this acquisition because we believe in the future of HuffPost and the potential it has to continue to define the media landscape for years to come.
With the addition of HuffPost, our media network will have more users, spending significantly more time with our content than any of our peers.”
BuzzFeed was launched all the way back in 2006 and included many list-type articles and has grown in the years since to cover news, videos and other important areas in media.
HuffPo has been a left-leaning news site since 2005 as well. The deal allows both properties to use their vast resources and followings to an advantage moving forward.
This is part of an ongoing trend in online media of companies consolidating over time.
Other competitors like Vice, Group Nine, and Vox have also acquired other content creators recently in similar deals.
This isn’t the first major deal by Verizon Media in recent years. It bought Yahoo in 2017 for $4.6 billion and this also brought Tumblr under is umbrella too.
Then, the company merged the media divisions on Yahoo with AOL to create Oath, which has been a failure in the years since. Tumblr was sold off again to Automattic in 2019.
Huffington Post had also been acquired by AOL almost ten years ago for $315 million, which was then in turn acquired by Verizon.
This latest maneuver just goes to show how incestuous things have become in the digital media space.
