So much for the buzz! After missing its 2015 goal by more than $80 million, it was reported last week that Buzzfeed missed its 2015 revenue goal by 32 percent and has cut its 2016 financial forecast in half – and other top left-wing websites like Gawker, Salon and the Huffington Post seem to be in just as much trouble.
Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari detailed the bad news for some of the more familiar liberal news outlets:
Buzzfeed is not alone. Salon.com, known for publishing articles so absurdly left-wing that their headlines are sometimes difficult to differentiate from its well-known parody Twitter account, was recently forced to lay off six long-time staffers, including Assistant Managing Editor Ruth Henrich and Life Editor Kim Brooks. Salon CEO Cindy Jeffers later confirmed that the layoffs were due to budget cuts at the company.
Gawker, another formerly successful blog known for its left-wing slant, has of course been in trouble for some time. Even before the outcome of the Hulk Hogan sex tape trial, which saw the new media site slapped with an eye-watering fine of $140 million, Gawker was on the ropes. The site’s traffic stalled, and then started a precipitous decline in late 2015.
Then, last November, the site gutted its verticals, cutting seven full-time editorial positions and pivoting to a political editorial focus.
…The Huffington Post recently let go dozens of employees after suffering tanking traffic figures, while Demand Media recently sold its floundering left-wing comedy site Cracked.com to E.W. Scripps. “Demand has shrunk down to a company that’s running a handful of content sites with declining traffic and revenue,” Re/code bluntly explained. And then there’s The New Republic: once a respected, high-brow political magazine, the publication was recently sold after former owner Chris Hughes tried and failed to convert it into a BuzzFeed-like content factory.”
And then there’s Vice Media -- a company practically swimming with investments, recently closing a $200 million deal with Disney. Last year’s estimates of $4.5 billion in revenue went to a meager $1 billion, and this year they are par for the course for disaster when the head of ad sales resigned after the site suffered a shocking 17.4 percent crash in traffic. Vice has also struggled with the move to television, where it’s cable TV network completely failed on its launch. It did so poorly the company tried to hide its ratings, but, as Bokhari points out, “…International Business Times discovered that its ratings were 77 percent lower than the channel it replaced. In raw numbers, Viceland received an average of just 60,400 viewers per day in its first week — fewer than many amateur YouTube channels.”
For all the liberal media outlets out there, apparently Vox Media seems to be the only one standing in decent shape, although it hasn’t released its 2015 finances to the public, but is still valued at $1 billion.
Maybe readers are tired of the “click-bait” tactics and want to read something of substance – something these and many other left-wing outlets lack. Or maybe they just need a strong conservative Republican president to motivate the leftists to click, click, click.
