After buying HuffPo, Buzzfeed lays off 45 staff

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Originally published at: After buying HuffPo, Buzzfeed lays off 45 staff | Boing Boing

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HUFFPO paid people?

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Hot takes ain’t cheap.

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The layoffs came without warning.

Except for those who already understood…

they were only buying an audience and intended to slash jobs and costs from the outset.

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HuffPo has had a long weird journey…thanks Andrew Breitbart and the team at AOL/Verizon!

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i wasn’t a big fan of Huffpo, but i hate Buzzfeed much more. this sucks. at least Huffpo is an actual news source.

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If your resume lists your career as “online journalist,” getting fired should be understood as normal.

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Buzzfeed’s business model:

  • get a list of something
  • make a clickbait headline
  • post
  • repeat

I’m surprised they haven’t completely automated it.

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It could be both 1 and 2 right? Buying a company on the skids to buy an audience. Seems like the way to go when people have brand loyalty and not loyalty to specific journalists sadly as much these days.

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Or just journalist period. It’s not like it’s the most stable industry out there.

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i knew a decent CEO of a pharma research company who was fond of saying: “Except for one CEO and a couple of stockholders, mergers always hurt everyone; most especially employees and clients”. i’ve never seen any evidence where he was notably incorrect.

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Yeah, I wasn’t much of a Huffpo reader. I avoided it as being TOO much in agreement with me, and I wanted to make sure I challenged my views regularly. But I can only see this as a net negative, and the constant drumbeat of how mergers mess up lives and - if unchecked - whole industries.

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Looks to me like BUZZFEED is “bulking up” to look more attractive for a buyout from…some other much larger company.

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I hope Ariana will be ok.

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Buzzfeed: Employees needed? Here’s 45 employees that are doomed after the buyout.

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CEO: Any “real” business-person knows that employees are the largest expenditure, and if you fire them all, profits soar!

Layperson: How does the company then make money?

CEO: Shut up.

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Shame that the CEO and stockholders are the ones making the decisions, then

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Sounds like there is some redundancy in staff. How many people do you really need to make a top 20 list of former memes and what they look like today (number 12 will surprise you!"

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It was remarkable how much, simply by persevering more than a year or two, people simply forgot that it was always something of a vapid vanity project that no one expected to last, least of all me. Kinda not surprised to hear they lose money hand over fist.

Hope the laid off are able to land on their feet ok.

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So they did some spring cleaning?

Joke aside, it can’t be a surprise that a company that list $20m in a year is laying off people.