This billionaire has an audacious plan to turn BuzzFeed into a streaming giant

Byron Allen has lofty ambitions for BuzzFeed. After announcing a $120 million deal to buy a controlling stake in the once high-flying digital media company, the billionaire media mogul says he can turn it into something altogether different: a competitor to YouTube.

The deal, which is expected to be finalized by the end of the month, includes HuffPost, which BuzzFeed acquired in 2020. Allen will take over as CEO and chairman of BuzzFeed and own 52% of its shares.

It’s a coda for BuzzFeed that might have seemed unfathomable a decade ago when the company boasted soaring traffic and was the envy of just about every millennial working in media. (As one transcendent 2015 advice column put it: “I Hate Myself Because I Don’t Work For BuzzFeed.“)

But BuzzFeed’s meteoric rise was stymied by — among other things — changing platform algorithms, dried-up venture capital money, and an unsuccessful pivot to AI.

Now, Allen hopes to turn the brand that defined 2010s journalism and media into a streaming juggernaut that will directly compete with the companies whose algorithms chipped away at BuzzFeed’s digital dominance.

Allen, who, through his media companies owns the Weather Channel, 13 local TV stations, and the free streaming app and TV service Local Now, doesn’t see his goal of competing with YouTube as a quixotic one, despite the numbers. The Google-owned video platform brought in $60 billion in subscription and advertising revenue last year.

“YouTube is phenomenal, they do a great job, but the content at YouTube is not exclusive,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday.

”Anybody who’s putting up content, they can put it up at YouTube. And now, pretty soon, they’re going to also be able to put it up at BuzzFeed.”

Allen has an existing media library as part of his Local Now, a service that offers local news, weather, and sports content via a free streaming app on smart TVs or a live-TV channel on some services like YouTubeTV and Dish Network.

He saw the acquisition of BuzzFeed irresistible. “The one thing I do know is this world loves the word ‘free’ and they love streaming,” Allen said. “‘Free streaming’ together is something they absolutely want and the biggest streamer out there is YouTube.”

Allen wants to beam BuzzFeed straight into your home by capitalizing on what some of his other properties lack: a big name.

“When I saw this opportunity with BuzzFeed and HuffPost, I said, okay, let’s take BuzzFeed, which has a huge brand name and millions of people using it every day, every week, every month, and now let’s put them in the streaming business,” Allen said.

BuzzFeed was once considered a pioneer and standout player in the expanding world of digital media. It became known for blogs, listicles, and quizzes about pop culture and internet ephemera, and experimented with video, audio, and, yes, exploding watermelons. In 2013, BuzzFeed rebuffed an offer from Disney to buy the company for $650 million.

It also heavily invested in serious journalism, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for a series on the mass detention of Muslims in China and spawning a generation of alumni who work in or are leading major newsrooms in America.

But like other digital upstarts with skyrocketing valuations, the bottom fell out. When the company went public in 2021, it was valued at $1.5 billion. But that valuable has sagged in the years since with its stock’s market capitalization hovering around $49 million.

BuzzFeed has gone through several rounds of layoffs and restructuring — including shutting down its news division in 2023 — and was reportedly nearing bankruptcy before the Allen deal came through.

As in many modern media deals, artificial intelligence will play a role in the company’s future. BuzzFeed founder and current CEO Jonah Peretti will become BuzzFeed’s president of AI after Allen takes over.

For his part, Allen said he will use artificial intelligence to aggregate user-generated content in order to compete with YouTube, but he plans to make investments into the news division of HuffPost.

“I want HuffPost to be the premier news platform out there,” he said. “I want HuffPost to be number one.” That means hiring the best journalists. “I’m a big believer in hiring the best and being the best.”

Allen has a history of failed bids to buy media companies, including two unsuccessful attempts to acquire CBS owner Paramount as recently as 2024, as well as past attempts to buy ABC, Black Entertainment Television (BET), VH1, and local station owner Tegna. He has also filed several high-profile lawsuits against corporations related to claims of racial discrimination, including one against Comcast that was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019. (In the end, Allen and Comcast, which denied wrongdoing, settled, but Allen got three of his channels into the cable packages offered by the company.)

More recently, Allen Media faced major backlash over a plan to consolidate weather operations at local TV stations to a centralized hub. It would have led to laying off local meteorologists across the country, and the company backed off last year following public criticism.

The year before, Allen laid off employees across the company: its stations, the Weather Channel, African American-focused site TheGrio, and a film production division.

In a news release announcing the deal, Peretti said BuzzFeed will “make significant changes, including cost reductions” before Allen takes over.

Allen, who got his start in comedy, also hosts the comedy panel show Comics Unleashed that will be taking over the coveted 11:35 p.m. time slot on CBS after Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show airs its last episode on May 21.

Allen is essentially leasing the airtime from CBS through a time-buy agreement.