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Buzzfeed has always intrigued me because they've been ahead of the curve in constantly evolving. Native ads, nailing social until FB cut it off, pivoting to video, ecommerce, etc.. But I've always thought that's a really really hard sustainable advantage.
Looks like they did ~$300M in revs last year, with 1300 employees. That's less than $250K in revenue per employee. It looks to me like YHOO's last year as standalone co they had 8500 employees and did $420K in ex-TAC rev/employee. The NY Times only has 3900 employees.
They clearly have had a hard time forecasting revenue, and meeting estimates, and probably staffed up ahead of themselves. But the other problem is if a really successful (relatively speaking) digital media co is only growing 15% at $300M, scale is really really hard to come by. 
It's amazing that we've come full circle on the internet to banner ads
Was curious, the NY Times did $558M in ad revs in 2017, $238M of which was digital and of that $200M was display. Through Q3 18, digital advertising was up .9% even tho display was down 4%. Much smaller audience, and subscriptions clearly the focus but just sizing the businesses.
Wouldn't be a thread without IAC... They just broke out DotDash as a segment. It will do $125-$130M in revs in 18, up 40%, with $16M in EBITDA. Tbf, they have nothing remotely like Buzzfeed News, which is the real deal, but again this is about finding a biz model that works.
DotDash claims 80M monthly uniques in the recent podcast. NYT reported today that Buzzfeed has 690M monthly readers. Obviously never know if those metrics are real or meaningful or comparable. But that would imply Dotdash monetizes at something like 4x Buzzfeed.
In grabbing those Stratechery excerpts on newspapers, came across this bit on Buzzfeed. This is not meant to call out Ben, but to show that Buzzfeed was set up to succeed as an internet first publisher with a business model most likely to succeed, and it has struggled.
