BuzzFeed News’ business model turned to dust because they were always at the whim of mercurial tech titans

theguardian.com:

The announcement of the demise of BuzzFeed News last week felt unlike the cavalcade of media closures and layoffs of the past decade. In a sense, it represented the death of an entire era.

BuzzFeed News, launched in 2011, imagined a format which would marry the intense virality and relentless social media focus of digital native publications with the serious reporting of major mastheads. The bet was that the site’s endless fountain of Harry Potter quizzes, viral news stories, celebrity gossip and pop culture gifs could subsidise a serious news operation, which would in turn lend real credibility to BuzzFeed as a whole.

The timing was perfect. Legacy media, already shaky after the financial crisis, was increasingly finding itself at the mercy of Facebook and Google, who had reshaped content distribution and the ad industry in their favour. Digital-only upstarts such as BuzzFeed, Mashable and Business Insider had built themselves to take advantage of those same trends and had secured a dominant share of millennial eyeballs as a result.

Suddenly, BuzzFeed News and a legion of imitators – buoyed by venture capital investment and the seemingly bottomless Facebook audience spigot – were making significant plays into the world of real news reporting; breaking stories left and right and adroitly packaging them for an extremely online audience. In those heady days, you could even imagine I Can Haz Cheeseburger opening a national security desk.

It’s difficult to understate the panic BuzzFeed’s foray into hard news inaugurated among the media old guard. In 2014, The New York Times distributed a “dire” internal report sounding the warning bell about the paper’s struggles to adapt to journalism’s digital revolution, which mentioned