BuzzFeed, Vice woes signal crisis in digital-only media
With the closure of BuzzFeed News and bankruptcy looming at Vice, the once promising world of free digital media finds itself at a crossroads, seeing ad revenues dry up at the same time as disappointed investors begin walking away.
BuzzFeed, one of the OG new media disruptors, announced in late April that it would shutter its news division. Translation: 180 jobs lost.
As for Vice, the company -- once a darling that attracted major funding from Disney and Fox, among others -- has canceled its signature show Vice News Tonight, laid off 100 people, and is reportedly on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.
The two media groups have different profiles and goals, but one thing they have in common is a reliance on advertising dollars to fund their operations.
But in tough economic times, advertising is one of the first things to go, and tech giants now account for 70 percent of all digital ad revenues, with Google and Facebook leading the way.
"I think the free model -- trying to build high volume, and then sell ads on that basis -- hasn't worked out nearly as well as hoped," says Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism research organization.
Ben Smith, the onetime editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, is more unequivocal.
"It's the end of the marriage between social media and news," he told The New York Times.
At the start of the 2010s, Vice and BuzzFeed -- along with the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post -- were the standard bearers of a new generation of media outlets that were completely online and ready to battle the traditional purveyors of news.
The model quickly seduced investors.
"These outlets expanded way beyond their capacity, because they were attracting an enormous amount of
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