Adweek reported the latest buzz on Byron Allen adding BuzzFeed to his media empire.
Under Byron Allen, BuzzFeed Sets Its Sights on the Living Room
The pivot mirrors a broader shift afoot in digital media, as audiences and ad budgets gravitate toward streaming
By Mark Stenberg
When it first launched in 2006, BuzzFeed was a trailblazer, creating from scratch a playbook for sparking virality in the early days of the social internet.
Now, following its Monday acquisition by media executive Byron Allen, the brand and its sister property, HuffPost, have trained their focus on the newest battleground in the attention wars: the living room.
“As of this moment, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube and the other big tech platforms,” Allen told The New York Times.
BuzzFeed is hardly alone in this pivot. Structural forces are threatening the durability of the open internet, with answer engines siphoning traffic away from websites and users increasingly gravitating toward mobile apps and walled gardens.
In response, media brands have adopted an increasingly distributed approach, cultivating audiences across channels including newsletters, podcasts, and live events. But one channel in particular appears poised for explosive growth: streaming television.
After years of deliberate expansion, streaming surpassed cable in total viewership in 2024, according to Nielsen. Its share of total television ad spend has gone from 15% in 2020 to 38% in 2025, with the crossover projected for 2027-2028, according to Adwave.
And while the streaming wars of the early pandemic centered largely on subscription-based products from the likes of Netflix, Disney, and Prime Video, the single largest player in the space for the last three years running is YouTube. The free, ad-supported platform captured 12.7% of all viewing in February—up from 7.9% in February 2023.
The platform, which has long been attractive to creators, is now increasingly drawing the attention of major media brands, as its accessibility, powerful algorithm, and simple monetization model make it nearly a video business in a box.
For a publisher like BuzzFeed, which has already built a dedicated following on the platform, doubling down on YouTube is a forward-thinking strategy. It can treat the website as the top of its content funnel, attracting viewers there before shepherding them into more direct relationships, such as through newsletters, podcasts, and commerce.
In this effort, Allen’s decades of expertise in television and the production infrastructure he has at hand could prove to be valuable tailwinds. The medium might be entirely different, but the content itself is not.
BuzzFeed is not the first media brand of its vintage to adopt this approach. Vice Media, which also encapsulated the froth of digital media in the last decade, has pivoted from a web and text-based business to a producer of video content. The upside of such a strategy might be diminished, but so too are the risks.
Of course, embracing such a streaming-centric playbook will naturally entail a substantial restructuring. Allen has already warned that layoffs are on the horizon.
And while BuzzFeed has a long history of launching popular franchises, HuffPost has a less established record on that front. News is a more saturated ecosystem than original programming, and HuffPost might struggle to compete with its blue-chip peers in the space.
For Allen, the acquisition is a relatively low-stakes gambit. The deal stipulates that he, through his holding company Allen Family Digital, only has to pay $20 million for his 52% ownership stake today. The rest of the $100 million will be paid over a five-year time horizon.
This means Allen gets the BuzzFeed, Tasty, and HuffPost brands—and, more importantly, their YouTube footprints—for about as much money as Valnet paid for Polygon or Ziff Davis paid for Dwell, Domino, Business of Home, and PopSci.
The bottom lines of these companies have sagged in recent years, but they have name-brand recognition and YouTube followings in the tens of millions. If Allen can successfully reorient these companies into video businesses, expect to see more such acquisitions in the near future.
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