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Comment by exogeny | Hacker News Reader

This was easy to see coming. Prestige doesn't matter if you're a public company, all that matters is this quarter's results. Buzzfeed could play that game when their investors were happy that Jonah was incinerating their money, but now that they're public and their SPAC dropped like a rock, anything unprofitable has got to go.

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"Prestige" BuzzFeed was always a tainted name there inability to realize how shitty their reputation was and release real news under a different name directly lead to this.

I have no idea why you are getting down-voted. It's 100% true that the absolutely terrible brand that is BuzzFeed spilled over BuzzFeed News and hurt its public perception.

Yep. Literally every thread about buzzfeed news has multiple posts explaining the different pods of the business, with the caveat that BFNews is serious.

An absolutely awful branding decision.

> I have no idea why you are getting down-voted. It's 100% true that the absolutely terrible brand that is BuzzFeed spilled over BuzzFeed News and hurt its public perception.

Don't you have that backwards? I was always under the impression that BuzzFeed News existed to help prop up the BuzzFeed brand's reputation.

BuzzFeed News was created later, years after BuzzFeed established its reputation as the internet equivalent of a shoddy tabloid. That crippled the News org's credibility from the very start; I know I still have a "drivel alert" instinct from their domain name, despite the knowledge that they have, in fact, produced impressive investigations at times.

And Buzzfeed News is also shit, it just looks good in comparison to Buzzfeed proper.

I'm not really sure that this matters. The problem is that the news organization didn't make money, and judging by the financials they aren't close to making money. It would be a different thing if we could point to other media companies that were making money with their better brand but they basically don't exist. They're either also unprofitable or they're massively bigger than Buzzfeed news - for example NYT has >20x the staff and has a huge reputation that took decades to establish. Buzzfeed going public was the right move, trying to go for scale and make the best of consolidation. The problem is that that plan failed because no one was willing to put up the cash to do it.

Eh, going public, by itself, doesn't necessarily result in this kind of outcome. There's plenty of public companies that are operating with little in profits or even at a net loss.

Presumably the way this SPAC was structured resulted in a change of control, and if you make that decision, you get what you get.

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