Episode Details

The blitzscaling funding model failed news companies.

Vice Media — which raised more than $1 billion from the likes of TPG, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Disney — is reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy.

BuzzFeed — which raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, General Atlantic, and NBCUniversal — just shut down its news division and has watched its stock price sink 95% since going public via a SPAC.

Meanwhile, Gawker, which successfully avoided the cash-burning approach, was brought down in a lawsuit funded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

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In his new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith takes stock of the heady days of media spending and snarky online writing. (Of course, for all his insistence that that spendy era of media is over, Smith is the co-founder of Semafor, a company that raised $25 million — including about $10 million from Sam Bankman-Fried — to build a new digital media business.)

I invited Smith on the podcast to talk about his new book.

I started the discussion by going back to David Carr’s 2012 profile of BuzzFeed.

Carr wrote at the time:

[W]ith the addition of Mr. Smith and his new hires, BuzzFeed is growing some serious news muscles under a silly, frilly skin, and added the header “2012” for election coverage. (More traditional news verticals will be rolled out in the coming months.) It’s gone well so far, with comScore showing 10.8 million unique visitors in December, more than double that of the same month in 2010.

Its business model, in part, capitalizes on the mix of high and low content; instead of banner ads, BuzzFeed works with companies like Pillsbury to create content ideal for sharing, including “10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do With a Crescent Roll.”

If it is successful, BuzzFeed will generate the kind of traffic that will rival behemoths like, yes, The Huffington Post. Mr. Peretti says that BuzzFeed makes a profit some months, but given the level of investment and growth — there are now 78 people in its Flatiron offices — the burn rate on that new chunk of capital is significant. “It’s fun to watch them make all these hires,” said Choire Sicha, the founder of

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