Companies in the digital media space, including BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox, and Bustle Media Group, are honed in on their primary skills.
The greater media shift that is cutting costs and emphasizing brands is reflected in the emphasis on distinctiveness made by smaller media organizations.
As businesses become more dissimilar, executives disagree on whether the digital media sector will experience another large wave of consolidation.
On December 6, 2021, in New York City, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti stands in front of the Nasdaq marketplace in Times Square as the business goes public through a merger with a special purpose organization.
When an engagement or marriage doesn’t work out, partners frequently take some time to focus on themselves.
The digital media industry can be found here. After years of focusing on consolidation to better compete with Google and Facebook for digital advertising dollars, many are the most prominent digital media companies have abandoned consolidation efforts to focus on differentiation.
What you discover is that businesses are looking for an indispensable core, according to Jonathan Miller, CEO of Integrated Media, a company that focuses on investing in digital media. “The time of trying to unite these companies is past, and I don’t see it returning.”
Digital media executives have had to reevaluate the future of their companies as a result of the 90% decrease in BuzzFeed shares since the company’s 2021 IPO, a failed sell-side process by Vice, the demise of special purpose entities, and a volatile advertising industry. For the time being, leaders believe that smaller, more targeted investments are preferable than large-scale initiatives.
In a CNBC interview, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti stated that “everyone is attempting to get through a difficult market by focusing on their strengths.Making strategic decisions based on consumer demand, not investor pressure, is a linchpin for the industry, said Bryan Goldberg, CEO of Bustle Digital Group, which has acquired and developed a number of women’s brands and websites, including Nylon , Scary Mommy and Romper and Elite Daily.
“Too many of the mergers were driven by investor needs and not consumer needs,” Goldberg said in an interview.
From late 2018 to early 2022, the digital media industry shared a common goal. Fueled by venture capitalists and private equity investors who made significant investments in the industry in the 2010s, companies like BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox Media, Group Nine and Bustle Digital Group or BDG, in various combinations, were talking to each other, about bringing together, to gain in size.
“If BuzzFeed and five of the other biggest companies were combined into one bigger digital media company, you could probably make more money,” Peretti told the New York Times in November 2018, kicking off a multi-year consolidation effort.
