Buzzfeed, Vice & Vox: what TV can learn from the 2010s darlings of digital media
Pluse YouTube's Brandcast, as well as more on the levels of fakeness out there on the internet.
Frequent readers are probably aware of my general unease about the growing levels of fakeness online and across all social platforms; where the distorting effects of financial incentives encourages people to publish whatever gets eyeballs to make a buck.
The culture of paid clipping, AI automation and faceless channels, viewbotting and content farms has grown for many reasons. But one factor includes the ‘platforms not publishers’ position of many tech companies which has resulted in weaker gatekeeping processes on user generated platforms in comparison to the standards operated by media companies. Here are a couple of pieces I’ve written recently on these themes:
And so, just this morning, Vulture has published the following piece on this theme of the distorting effects of our social feeds being full of paid activity or disinformation. I’d encourage you to read it, and then bake it into your thinking when considering the internet, our culture, social platforms and user generated content.
To quote one part:
We’ve locked ourselves in the stupidest possible version of Plato’s cave, where what looks like the spontaneous consensus of the hive mind is often just shadows on the wall, put there by marketers, political operatives, foreign-influence campaigns, or anyone else with a few hundred bucks and something to sell.
On that cheery note, on to today’s post which focusses on a trip down memory lane and what it can teach us about the future.
What we can learn from the 2010s darlings of digital media
Buzzfeed, Vice, Vox, Pitchfork, HuffPo, Gawker, Jezebel. These digital publishing businesses were enormous in the 2010s, each blending a seemingly perfect mix of long form journalism, cultural commentary, internet snark and a whole slew of new digital content formats like vines and listicles; perfectly tapping into and creating the cultural zeitgeist for millennials or younger gen Xers.
However, these brands have been shadows of their former selves for some years now. And in the last few weeks, it has been reported that James Murdoch is looking to buy parts of Vox Media, while Buzzfeed has a new owner in Byron Allen, whose ambition for the brand is outlined in the interview below:
Allen, a former comic, says he sees BuzzFeed as a means of creating the next free streaming giant à la YouTube. His private media company, Allen Media Group, owns the Weather Channel and more than 30 local TV stations. Last month, he purchased Stephen Colbert’s late-night slot on CBS, which will now air Comics Unleashed, a comedy talk show hosted by Allen.
The above visual was posted online, with the following quote: ‘The Millennial falloff will be studied for generations’, and then lists these brands being dead, mostly dead, irrelevant or ‘boomer slop’ in the case of Facebook. The poster went on to say:
All these companies, people, genres, and trends that once defined a generation are now gone, passé, or enshitified.
The millennial stuff ran smack into a brick wall for some reason (The brick wall is social media. Anything that would be a movement is seen as a trend and quickly dismissed).
I thought I’d do a quick trip through what went wrong for these businesses, and what - if anything - producers of film and TV can learn from their experiences.
What went wrong?
Of course, each business was and is different. However, here I’ll focus on Buzzfeed which perhaps best illustrates the ups and then downs of the digital publishing phenomena.
Firstly, there was a heavy dependence on traffic being sent from Facebook to their websites. This type of social sharing was a central part in the growth of the businesses, and also the growth of the social platforms themselves. When the platforms changed their algorithms - specifically Facebook, and its 2018 feed update to prioritise ‘meaningful social interactions’ with friends and family over content from publishers - the traffic to their websites dried up, and so did their revenues.
As the Wired piece above states:
In his memo announcing the closure of BuzzFeed’s news operations, CEO Jonah Peretti acknowledged a grave mistake: He hadn’t worked out that Facebook wasn’t his friend.
Peretti, of course, put it differently. He had, he admitted, been “slow to accept that big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.” BuzzFeed, which seems to have been built for Facebook’s algorithm, had tried to precariously balance a world-class news organization on top. This week, that plan came crashing down.
Secondly, the dominant form of income on these platforms was native advertising, which was expensive to operate. These publishers - especially Buzzfeed - pioneered this new form of advertising, where sponsored content packages were directly sold to brands and agencies, and the bespoke creative was made by in-house teams. While hugely lucrative for a period, eventually the expensive overheads caught up with them, and the digital ad spend shifted more towards cheaper programmatic ads distributed across a wider range of platforms and destinations, all controlled by the big tech companies.
These digital media companies then often followed this similar shift towards carrying programmatic ads. And despite have an attractive demographic to advertisers (young, relatively well off, interested in a range of consumer and lifestyle products), this type of digital advertising was at the bottom of the food chain. Income was heavily dependent on getting high volumes of page visits to drive up display advertising impressions on each page. At the same time, advertisers were increasingly moving their spend to video formats, which was an area where there was a lot more competition for these advertising budgets from TV, streamers, creators, influencers and so on.
Thirdly, part of the appeal of these digital news brands was they blended proper journalism with the irreverent and silly. However, while listicles and the like might be relatively cheap to produce, investigative journalism is expensive. And the 2010s was the time when the first half of Stewart Brand’s quote (‘information wants to be free’) was the dominant mindset, and the second half was usually ignored (‘information also wants to be expensive.’). While some publications had introduced paywalls (The Times and the New York Times most notably, back in 2010), the dominant culture was one of free-with-ads being the better, fairer and more accessible model. Indeed, there was (and remains) a cultural allergic reaction in many news and publishing organisation to any form of payment as by definition it excludes the non-payers. This has meant that for many decades, the concept of paying for online news often didn’t even make its way onto the table for consideration.
So while Buzzfeed et al were investing in expensive journalism, it was before the rise of subscription newsletter models, where the new low-cost email platforms like Substack or Beehiiv are preferred over expensive and clunky owned and operated websites.
Fourthly, they didn’t embrace creator culture. This challenge will be very familiar to those working in all sorts of aspects across TV, movies and digital content, and not just those with staff wanting to become talent themselves: how do you encourage and grow an individual who might end up leaving to set up on their own or go work for a competitor?
Despite being fleet of foot in entering YouTube early - and having successes on the platform - part of the issue was that they found themselves stuck treating their in-house staff as employees rather than creator talent. As Simon Owens wrote recently:
BuzzFeed entered YouTube so early that it still operated with fairly traditional employment contracts, restricting creators from launching their own channels or collaborating freely with other YouTubers. Many stars eventually rebelled against those limitations and left to start independent ventures. “Why I Left BuzzFeed” videos became so common on YouTube that they practically turned into their own genre.
To give one example - Michelle Khare worked at Buzzfeed, where her ability to grow her own channel was limited. And here she is now, with 5m subscribers, deals with sponsors such as Red Bull, and a slate of shows that she is hoping will secure her an Emmy nomination in the future.
Fifthly, perhaps Buzzfeed and the like are best viewed as great examples of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Where they first disrupted the market, they then became wedded to their business model that they themselves became disrupted. All within the space of 10 - 15 years. Simply put, they tried to become an upmarket prestige news operation and media brand, which requires an expensive newsroom and technical/advertising operation to drive its income. However, this was against the backdrop of a shrinking advertising business model which made pivoting difficult while smaller, more nimble competitors and creators emerged on other platforms.
What is in this tale for producers to consider?
Firstly, and most obviously, be wary of investing and building a business based on any sort of assumption that a tech company’s strategy will remain the same, or that they will remain aligned with the success of your business.
Diversify your operation’s reliance as much as you can. In the same way producers often seek out new commissioning relationships, knowing that a person within a particular network or broadcaster might move on, and then you are left without a touchpoint or relationship with a key buyer. A similar principle applies here, however rather than it being just people, it is also platforms. So while these platforms all create great opportunities to reach audiences and perhaps build some revenue, take a leaf out of many of the mega creators’ books and ensure you are in tandem building up an audience capturing mechanism of your own. Always keep in mind the question - what would happen if my YouTube channel or Instagram account was deleted, what would that mean for my business?
What does this diversification look like in practice? It can range from building your own bespoke website or system, or using a third party platform where you own the audience contact data (like Substack, Beehiiv, Nebula, UStream and so on). All the way through to simply creating an email list or WhatsApp group. Which, if you haven’t done so yet, please read this post below and put it to the top of your to do list:
I also think the story of the rise and fall of these new publishing businesses are something to keep in mind whenever there is hype flying around - which, let’s be frank, is all the time. It is easy in hindsight to see what went wrong, however, at the time, it must have been exceptionally hard to manage an expensive content business in a world where low cost advertising and a shift to platforms made it increasingly impossible to sustain. However, there are (and perhaps long will continue) similar noises being made now about whatever is the latest content type, creator model or platform being the hot new thing. As Kipling wrote, ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…’.
Another thing to keep in mind is to be wary of reach over quality. We all talk in views (6bn views! 25m views!) however, big numbers don’t necessarily translate to revenues or a reliable business. Here, the solid financials of the news businesses that invested in paywalls (often at a time when they were hugely unpopular) over those who went for advertising income driven by reach is something to note. Big numbers don’t necessarily equate to solid income - indeed, it is true that many of the most lucrative online businesses are those with smaller footprints but have a much more valuable demographic or proposition.
One last point - I have written a long post that I’ll share soon about the history of investment by the UK’s broadcasters into multiplatform/digital exploration going back to the late 1990s. By my (admittedly) back of an envelope calculations, the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV have spent north of £1bn on all sorts of 360 degree, online, multiplatform, crossplatform, transmedia, digital-first projects over the years. And this is excluding all the spend on VOD such as iPlayer, 4oD/All4 or ITVX going back to 2006. In other words, UK TV broadcasters didn’t ignore the internet until the late 2010s/early 2020s, quite the opposite….
There is much to learn from all these projects, but the reason to bring it up here is that in the 2000s, broadcasters like Channel 4 had a whole portfolio of digital commercial publishing businesses targeting specific audiences: e4.com, 4Homes, 4Food, 4Car, 4Beauty (the name 4Skin was sadly rejected). The decline in the commercial viability of display advertising and the page impression model became clear after the 2008 financial crash, and this happened within the same time frame as the rise of VOD as a commercially and strategically aligned opportunity.
So, it is interesting that just a few years later in the 2010s, despite companies like Buzzfeed and Vice causing such excitement that they had created a new commercial model for content and journalism, none of the UK’s broadcasters tried to emulate these businesses. Perhaps it was in part because of the memories of their own forays in the 2000s which showed how tricky the economics are of running large editorial teams funded by display/social video advertising, sponsorship and branded content.
YouTube’s upfront - Brandcast 2026
As many have noted before, the whole ‘YouTube is TV’ narrative is part of a push by the corporation to try to grab hold of the $170bn annual global spend on TV advertising. However, what is also worth keeping in mind are all the other multifaceted battles they are simultaneously engaged in. In summary:
Vertical scrolling video with TikTok and Reels - the latter is reported to be on course to make $50bn in revenue this year (and sharing comparatively little with creators), if true, this is more than YouTube made in advertising in 2025
Longer form TV video in the living room - this is the battle for the $170bn mentioned above (£4.9bn is spent in the UK on TV advertising)
Media companies wanting better deal terms - for the owners of big libraries like ITV and BBC Studios, they are seeking revenue percentages more in line with the existing distribution market, rather than the terms offered by YouTube
Big splashy rights like the NFL in the US - while YouTube might have deep pockets, they are going up against seasoned media moguls who are not take their encroachment lying down.
Plus of course, casual games via Playables, podcasting, radio and live streaming, their OTT YouTubeTV cable competitor and more. I wrote previously about the tensions at play here for YouTube, as it is running so many strategies simultaneously, but perhaps their ‘category of one’ means they’ll continue to defy logic and typical business constraints:
This is the backdrop to this week YouTube’s version of an upfront, Brandcast 2026.
The above post covers everything they announced, and there are two points I thought worth drawing your attention to.
The first is that the company is continuing its strategy of enabling brands to sponsor particular creator content, rather than YouTube financing the production themselves.
As a reminder, YouTube shut down its originals programme back in 2022, at a similar time many of the other tech companies did likewise (Facebook Watch and Snap’s originals for example). While at the time, many of these companies were using their commissioning strategy to stimulate a new behaviour or market intervention (by commissioning TV production companies it could entice others onto the platform), they soon realised it was much easier to promote rather than fund the content that creators are making anyway. As Scalable commented:
By positioning these creator shows as exclusives, YouTube now has a series of pre-planned, premium creator-led content it can pitch to big advertisers the way traditional TV networks do. And that’s exactly what YouTube is now doing.
There continues to be a lack of granular detail on user behaviours, engagement, views and revenues on YouTube. For example, how much of the content, views and revenues are for:
Creator-type channels similar to the ones showcased this week
IP libraries of TV shows
Brand content
Music videos
Gaming walk throughs
Podcasts
Live streams of fireplaces or AI generated music
How to videos.
So, when YouTube says it reached over 244m people 18+ across all devices in the US in November 2025, which is 91% of the total population, the natural questions that follow are (to name but a few):
What is the average watch time? How frequently do they watch? What is the demographic breakdown by watch time? What is the average percentage viewed metric by demographic and device?
What are they watching? How much are people looking for a video to explain how to programme their washing machines or a setting on their iPhone vs those watching creator content as showcased at Broadcast? How much is toddler content and how much for older kids and teens? What specific genres dominate? How much is Shorts?
As Scalable referenced, Spotter recently said that what they define as ‘creator TV’ - that is, episodic videos that are at least 22 minutes long, have a predictable release schedule, average 100k+ an episode and are mainly viewed on TV - make up less that 0.02% of all social video in the US (from 6,600 creators).
The second point to highlight is around Gemini and AI, and how as Michael Ruffalo from Shopify put it, ‘the sleeper hit [of Brandcast] … was Gemini GEO’. (GEO being generative engine optimisation, so optimising content for AI rather than SEO which is for search engines).
He went on to write:
If organic creator content is going to factor heavily into how AI systems rank, retrieve, and recommend information, then creator strategy becomes more than sponsorships. Creator content becomes reputation infrastructure. It becomes the evidence layer people — and AI — use to decide what to buy, where to go, who to trust, and what matters.
Or as Sam Barcroft put it more succinctly:
YouTube is now a key pillar of AI. It’s where Gemini goes to learn.
So, if you want to be prominent in AI results, build on YouTube.
And this brings into focus something I’ve written about previously, which is the growing awareness that user generated social platform owners are using uploaded video assets as a massive training resource for their AI engines. If this results in traffic and profile for a video channel or creator, all good. The worry is that when someone asks Gemini a question, they are presented with the answer that is derived from videos, but no traffic is sent back to the original video.
Here is an example I’ve shared before. CyberCPU Tech is a creator specialising in fixing computers. His most popular video is how to fix a UEFI bootloader - so pretty technical. He says that traffic to his video has dropped in half over the last six months and then goes on to say the if you ask Google how to fix a UEFI bootloader, Gemini will give his exact step by step process that he claims are copied directly from his video. He adds:
I got no royalty payments and don’t even get a link to the original video. I simply lost the traffic and Google is able to provide more value from stolen content.
This follows the familiar pattern of how Google’s search swallowed website text content and presents it back as snippets without passing the traffic to the originator.
These trends are increasing in the age of AI, for example:
Now it is happening across the wider ‘how to’ informational video market, which is likely to have a big impact. Not least, if creators stop making high quality ‘how to’ videos as there is no financial reason to do so, then it is likely that the AI answers will deteriorate over time.
This theme will grow in importance over the coming months and years, so one to factor into your thinking about search and AI.
Meanwhile, Google has also this week published new guidelines for websites regarding generative AI and their search results:
Graphic of the week
Spotted a graph from Sherwood this week, showing the changing shifts in Netflix’s relative content spend (which is addition to content assets divided by total revenue).
Sherwood went on to comment that despite the sums invested climbing, this has slimed compared to the company’s total revenues:
At the peak of its content cash splashing days in late 2021, Netflix was spending 73 cents for every dollar of revenue it brought in, as the streamer added hits, old and new, to try and keep viewers’ eyes glued to their screens in the post-pandemic landscape. In the last quarter, that ratio had dropped to just 40 cents per dollar.