BuzzFeed News, the digital news website that took the internet by storm right at the cusp of social media’s revolutionary turn in the 2010s, will soon shutter itself down. But once upon a time, BuzzFeed let go of a half-billion-dollar buyout offer and kept on riding the digital media wave until it finally drowned by the weight of its own success in April 2023.
BuzzFeed-Disney unsuccessful buyout deal: What happened?
According to former BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith, about a decade ago, BuzzFeed President Jon Steinberg reportedly got on his knees to beg its founder, Jonah Peretti, to accept a $650 million buyout deal from Disney.
ALSO WATCH | Buzzfeed news to shut down
In an excerpt shared with Vanity Fair from his upcoming book Traffic, Smith suggests that in the early 2010s, Disney was searching for a way to break into a media landscape with social media engagement as defining Universal Selling Point (USP).
At the same time, BuzzFeed emerged as heralder-in-chief of digital media, with up to 130 million unique visitors a month.
Smith writes how the BuzzFeed founder Peretti began negotiations with Disney. Peretti listed out that he would want for the deal to go through, which included an asking price of $600 million.
A meeting between top Disney and BuzzFeed executives took place.
The BuzzFeed president pushed his company’s founder to take the buyout deal.
In a classic ‘Godfather’ way, Disney came up with an offer they thought BuzzFeed would not refuse.
Disney’s official offer came through later, Smith writes, to buy the business for $450 million with the potential for an additional $200 million.
“It became clear that this was an offer that Peretti, almost, couldn’t refuse,” Smith writes.
BuzzFeed-Disney unsuccessful buyout deal: So what went wrong?
According to Ben Smith, Peretti was invited to speak at Disney’s management retreat in front of 250 members of staff. After the event, the BuzzFeed founder was supposed to meet Disney CEO Ben Iger privately.
Smith writes that “Iger had staged Peretti’s speech in a marquee slot to welcome him to the [Disney] family,” and the internet entrepreneur “delivered one of his standard, edgy monologues.”
The speech, Smith writes, did not go down very well.
An HR executive for Disney observed that BuzzFeed founder’s comments about Mormons and Jews made him a “problem,” according to Smith.
“Peretti had never gotten fewer laughs in his life,” Smith wrote.
Peretti came offstage and told Iger he couldn’t take the deal, Smith writes.
According to Smith, the BuzzFeed president was convinced that his news outlet would taste Facebook-like success. The Disney CEO thought otherwise.
The Disney CEO Ben Iger reportedly told an aide: “F**k him, he loses. That company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”
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