Tuesday 29th June: BuzzFeed's great leap into the future of digital media (hopefully)

June 29, 2021

Howdy all! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

So all the manoeuvring and repositioning of BuzzFeed and its various properties has led to this. The long-awaited public offering of BuzzFeed is upon us. As Sarah Scire writes for Nieman Lab, that affords us a rare chance to peek behind the curtain at the trailblazing digital publisher, to see what it sees as its opportunities for growth and, perhaps more importantly, what it sees as its weak spots.

This paragraph in particular lays bare the scale of its ambition: "BuzzFeed plans to go public at an estimated valuation of $1.5 billion and predicts double-digit growth in multiple revenue buckets. The digital media company’s advertising revenue, for example, grew 13% in 2019 and 2020. But BuzzFeed management projects ad revenue to grow by 32% in 2021 and then at least 20% every year after that."

A tall order, considering that the industry-wide growth has been estimated around 7% for 2021. Even with all the acquisitions it's made to shore up its e-commerce revenue, there are real questions about whether BuzzFeed can continue to outpace the industry by that much.

A really interesting one here from Politico, especially in light of the news we included yesterday about Reach hiring an online safety editor to safeguard its journalists online. There's tons more in there, too, from how newsrooms are faring post-Trump to where we are on the road to better representation. Good read.

This one's behind the FT paywall, but for those of you without a subscription the top line is that the ongoing efforts across Europe to force the Duopoly to "pay for news" has gained yet more traction. This time it's Denmark's media houses that feel there's strength in numbers.

This might be the first time we've linked to the Daily Express on a Media Roundup! But it's worth it to provide a bit of context for why Andrew Neil has taken a 'bit of a break' from the channel only two weeks after launch - after a strong start, the reported viewer numbers are terrible.

This week's episode:

This week, we hear from Jo Holdaway, Chief Data and Marketing Officer at Independent Digital News & Media – home of The Independent and The Evening Standard. She talks about what sort of data is important to publishers, especially when it comes to subscription strategies, why it’s important to have a diverse team working with data, and how she’s preparing the business for the sunsetting of third-party cookies.

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