Checking in on BuzzFeed
Good morning!
Welcome to this week’s edition of Are You Engaged? I’m entering Week 6 of my quarantine and starting to feel a little bit of the restlessness that comes with sheltering in place. The one thing that has brought me some respite was the premiere of “The Last Dance” on ESPN on Sunday night. This documentary about Michael Jordan and 1990s Chicago Bulls has already lived up to its much-anticipated hype and created a sense of community, conversation, and just a shared love of something that I haven’t experienced in a long time. And it’s been very, very welcome—especially now.
In media news, the Vox furloughs hit last Friday and impacted 9% of the staff, including one of the most prominent NBA writers at SB Nation. There are also executive cost-saving measures happening at NPR in the hopes of avoiding a similar situation in the coming weeks, as well as at Meredith.
And there seem to be more shake ups at G/O Media. Jason Schreier, one of the lead editors at the video game site Kotaku, has left the company due to issues with leadership. Schreier’s resignation comes after the editor-in-chief of tech website Gizmodo, Kelly Bourdet, also announced she was leaving the company last week. These latest changes follow after the well-documented clashes between G/O Media leadership and the staff of Deadspin that led to that site’s fall, as well as the shuttering of news-site Splinter.
I wish I had more good news to report in this space, but each week the landscape continues to look shakier and shakier. I am truly uncertain about what a career in digital media and publishing looks like in the next year, let alone the next 10 years.
A few weeks ago, I briefly looked at BuzzFeed’s overhaul of their business model via affiliate revenue or commerce content. The company had moved away from an advertising dominant revenue stream model to a more balanced revenue model. All of that progress has been totally upended by COVID-19 as the company has undergone salary cuts in an effort to save costs.
Since that newsletter, Amazon and Walmart announced that they were holding or discontinuing their affiliate deals with publishers like BuzzFeed. Amazon is reportedly only temporarily suspending these deals due to their own stock supply restraints. But who knows if they will revisit these arrangements with publishers in the near future. And even a short-term break in that revenue stream has an extremely damaging impact on a publisher like BuzzFeed.
However, it seems like BuzzFeed is already adjusting or attempting to shift course and maintain their affiliate revenue stream.
Last week, the company launched a new Facebook group around their BuzzFeed Shopping vertical. The Facebook group, called BuzzFeed Buy Me That, is intended to “get all the biggest online shopping fans in one place to discuss favorite products, share photos, post discount codes, give reviews and even have the opportunity to ask some BuzzFeed writers for their own products recommendations and thoughts.” Product reviews and photos shared by group members have the potential to be featured in articles on BuzzFeed’s Shopping vertical.
Publishers with robust audience development or social teams have been experimenting with Facebook groups for a few years now, so this new page is nothing new. However, using the group as a place to provide affiliate partners with examples of consumer preferences through user generated content (UGC) is an interesting value prop and approach.
Looking at the BuzzFeed Shopping vertical page another interesting trend emerges: articles written specifically about products available from non-Amazon marketplaces or retailers. Just scrolling the recent posts, you see headlines like “28 Office Products From Wayfair That Reviewers Truly Love,” “13 Skincare Products From Sephora That We Truly Love,” and “36 Of The Best Home Products From Target That Cost Less Than $20.”
The Information broke the news about Amazon suspending their deals with publishers on March 31st, and it appears that BuzzFeed was already creating shopping content tailored at certain retailers and ecommerce marketplaces before that date. Perhaps this kind of hedging away from Amazon was already in the works—or maybe BuzzFeed had already been given notice prior to The Information’s report. The BuzzFeed Shopping Facebook page shows a notable uptick in non-Amazon brands called out in headlines around the middle to end of March, and the scroll on the BuzzFeed Shopping vertical page cuts off at around the beginning of April. I won’t posit any more theories, and without any real reporting or research this is all speculation on my part anyway.
But, based on appearances, it already seems like BuzzFeed has shifted to a post-Amazon affiliate revenue present and potentially a post Amazon affiliate revenue future. It will be interesting to see if this two-pronged approach of more direct audience development and community engagement via a Facebook group and a targeted approach to ecommerce content outside of Amazon will help ease some of the bottom-line loss that BuzzFeed has been hit with over the past month.
A Little Bit of Culture
Each week I end the newsletter with a brief ode/rant/riff on a bit of culture I’m passionate about. It might be music, it might be movies or TV, it might be a book, and sometimes it might be related to sports. Once a month, I’ll go a little longer on something.
This week: “They Don’t Know” by Kirsty MacColl
This 1979 single by Kirsty MacColl represents a particular genre of song that I like to call “my heart might burst” pop. Some other examples include “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, “I Saw Her Again” by The Mamas and the Papas, “Xanadu” by Olivia Newton John, and “Super Trouper” by ABBA. But “They Don’t Know” is perhaps one of the best (if not the best) examples of this kind of song. What these songs have in common is a sense of melancholy throughout the verses that is somehow miraculously replaced by a strain of triumph in the chorus. You find yourself regretting decisions, lamenting loves lost that maybe never even existed until all of a sudden you feel invincible, as if this music and this song could protect you from anything bad ever happening to you again. As “They Don’t Know” continues with its deliberate tempo and 1960s girl group harmonies, you can almost feel your heart swell and expand to its breaking point. And the song has great details—like the sneakily searing guitar solo at 1:36 and the falsetto “baybey” that hits at 1:52—that seem like divine inspiration but are really the result of genius songwriting and composition. The song is perhaps better known in the 1983 cover version by Tracy Ullman, but I’ve come to love MacColl’s original more. It’s a song that makes you feel alive; and during times like these, it's good to remember that you are.
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