Good morning and welcome to a new (short) week. Lucinda Southern, Adweek media editor here, and I hope you had a restful weekend.
I took a closer look at what to expect from the BuzzFeed HuffPost merger, aside from cheap scale and a better tech stack.
Jonah Peretti said in January 2020 that BuzzFeed’s model had become more diversified (thanks to growing lines from commerce and platforms), in 2019 still over half its revenue came from “native” and “media.”
To make digital ads work, BuzzFeed needs scale. With HuffPost, it got that for cheap. Its reach is a long way off matching Google and Facebook, but, as some analysts told me, that's ok. A profitable and sustainable business is still possible.
With a long winter ahead (after a grueling year ravaged by coronavirus) ad-funded digital media companies also face pressure to keep hold of top talent. Last week, Ezra Klein and Lauren Williams announced they are both leaving Vox, for The New York Times and to set up a nonprofit newsroom, respectively.
Hardly a hot take, but most of the time, journalists will go to the organizations that create the optimum environments for them to do their best work. Subscriptions (and, to a lesser extent, hard-to-ignore Substack) offer that security. Guaranteed recurring revenue to start the year means companies can invest and come good on their hiring promises.
Watch for how creative digital-media darlings are in keeping and attracting new recruits.
With that seamless segway, it seems relevant to point out how you can take out an Adweek Pro Subscription and support our newsroom.
Thanks for reading,
Lucinda
