What was the point of BuzzFeed’s HuffPost acquisition?

This post is auto-generated from a public YouTube interview for personal study notes. It is not an endorsement. The transcript is machine-derived and may contain errors; refer to the original video for accuracy.

About this video

There was a time when HuffPost and BuzzFeed looked like the future of digital media.

Both mastered the mechanics of internet distribution, attracted enormous audiences, and convinced investors that scale itself could become a durable competitive advantage.

So how did two of the defining brands of the digital-media era end up shrinking so dramatically?

Was the underlying business model always flawed, or did a series of strategic mistakes — from costly acquisitions to overreliance on platforms like Facebook — turn these promising companies into cautionary tales?

To help answer these questions, I brought on Jason Krebs, a longtime media executive who has worked at some of the industry’s biggest companies, including Google, Disney, The New York Times, and Condé Nast.

He’s spent decades watching media business models rise and fall, which makes him an especially useful person to talk to about an industry that keeps cycling through new theories about distribution and scale.

We also discussed two very different approaches to building subscription businesses.

Jason weighed in on The New York Times’ experiment with an AI chatbot trained on its own archives and whether the reputational risks are worth it.

And we dug into MS NOW’s new subscription product, debating whether personality-driven hosts like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes can convert their audiences into paying members.