In the 19 years since Guido was founded we have seen a lot of fads come and go, along with investors’ money and the existence of the publications themselves. Who now remembers Westmonster?
Vice was supposedly a supernova multi-billion dollar digital media company that was going to replace MTV and CNN with its new stylised video-journalism, which seemed to produce warzone reports in the manner of a music video. In 2017 Vice was valued at $5.7 billion, Guido could never figure out how Vice made money. There was very little traditional advertising. There were “brand partnerships” with cool brands. Cool brands which didn’t seem to be marketing their products, just associating themselves with another cool brand –Vice. Eventually the brands suffer a comedown from being associated with rockstar war reporters and stop wasting their money on “partnerships”, instead concentrating on boosting e-commerce markegting. Because you know what is the coolest thing? Making a profit.
Buzzfeed and its listicles have blown hundreds of millions of their investors’ money. Now they claim AI will save them from bankruptcy. Which seems to Guido to be an admission that they are completely exiting the business of journalism. Good luck to those who still have jobs at Buzzfeed subsidiary HuffPo…
Vice going bankrupt and taking down with it investments from the likes of Disney, James Murdoch and George Soros goes to show how hard it is to make video journalism pay. Guido makes occasional forays into video; these are expensive in terms of time and manpower. We have yet to figure out how to make them commercially viable. All credit to the likes of Novara Media getting supporters of their world view to finance their output – which is basically a left-wing version of radio phone ins where the presenters aggregate and regurgitate the prejudices of their audience, slicker and better with added access to talking heads. It works and we have considered it and tried it ourselves. At the end of the day we’re in the business of breaking news… and making profits.
An Ofcom survey of regular users ranked Huffington Post lower than Twitter, YouTube and other social media sources as a source of news and understanding about Covid. The majority of readers of newspapers like The Sun and the Daily Mail rated the publications as providing helpful news about Covid-19, compared to less than a third of Huffington Post readers. Guido wonders whether the BBC – who are considering HuffPo’s former editor Jess Brammar for the role of Executive News Editor – will take into account that her own readers didn’t rate the coverage she oversaw very highly. HuffPo users rated their coverage half as positively compared to BBC users when it came to understanding Covid…
According to the Ofcom News Consumption Survey, which was carried out months before Brammar quit and HuffPo closed the newsdesk, just 40% of its regular users deemed HuffPo a good Covid-19 news source. With just 32% of regular HuffPo users considering the online news site helpful at reporting Covid-19 restrictions, making it the lowest ranked online new-source employing journalists – polling even lower than Snapchat (35%), Instagram (35%), and Facebook (36%). Extraordinarily poor ratings when one considers the latter are user-generated news sources rather than a news source editorially driven by paid journalists…
After Guido reported that Jess Brammar was in the running to become head of BBC News, and that this was controversial given she’d promoted a woke agenda as editor of the Huffington Post, some people who should know better claimed this was untrue. Jess had made it hard to produce evidence because she’d deleted thousands of her tweets going back a decade. Which was eyebrow-raising in itself.
On Brammer’s Instagram account, Guido found that on the BLM campaign’s social media “Blackout Tuesday” last June, Brammar joined with other BLM supporters in posting a black square to signal her support for the campaign which has some far out policies – including defunding the police. Given she is seeking a position of great sensitivity (in that the role involves setting the tone for the nation’s dominant BBC news channels and guaranteeing the impartiality of the output), this is not insignificant. If she were currently employed by the BBC this would be in breach of the BBC’s new social media guidelines established by Tim Davie…
Her posts detail her struggle with “White Privilege” and motherhood, and even has the self-awareness in some of her Instagram posts to realise that she is becoming a woke parody. Holding a woke book for toddlers open on the page “P is for Privilege“, she posts “Yes I am very happy to be a parody of myself”. In another post she says she and her partner, Guardian media editor Jim Waterson, are anti-cars – except when they need to hire one. Guido sympathises with Jess having to hide her feminist rage at the line in the “Wheels on the Bus” rhyme “the mummies on the bus go shhh shhh shhh”, it is so infuriatingly unwoke…
Guido missed this excellent point from Jacob Rees-Mogg in the Commons yesterday. The Leader of the House had been asked by Bob Blackman if he could arrange a debate on the requirement for BBC News to remain impartial, and to “reflect the news rather than the opinions of those who preside over it?” citing the floated appointment of ex-Huffington Post editor Jess Brammer. Rees-Mogg made the point:
“The BBC must ask itself, if it is going to make an appointment from the Huffington Post, whether it would make an appointment from the Guido Fawkes website, a similar news outlet, except a rather more accurate one, on the right rather than on the left.”
We already know the answer, Huffington Post’s political editor* regularly presents Radio 4’s “Week in Westminster”, no one from Guido has ever been asked to present the show…
*Paul Waugh announced this morning that he is off to become the new chief political commentator of the i newspaper. We wish him well…
Last month the left-leaning news site Huffington Post was taken over by Buzzfeed, another woke, money losing news website. It has immediately gone about cutting staff and closing divisions worldwide. Guido is told that the London news desk is to close and the operation is to be slimmed down to focus on politics, entertainment and lifestyle. Job losses have not yet been officially announced…
Between them the two left-leaning news sites famous for listicles and side-boob stories have lost investors over a billion dollars since launching. The trash-traffic site’s CEO, Jonah Peretti, is determined to keep in the expensive business of political reporting, despite stiff opposition on both sides of the Atlantic from Politico as well as the traditional news brands of broadcasters and newspapers. Good luck, you’ll need it…
Buzzfeed has never made a profit in 13 years, after being in business that long it is hard to claim you are still a start-up, or as they put it in a statement accompanying the late filing of the UK subsidiary’s annual accounts “still in investment mode”. Which is another way of saying “still losing money”.
The UK subsidiary has quadrupled losses, turnover slumped 35% to £21.6 million, which they say was due to “intercompany revenue” from parent company BuzzFeed Inc. dropping £14.8 million. Whatever those financial shenanigans were they have come to an end. Investors will marvel at how Buzzfeed has burnt through over $500 million of their money which they will never get back.
The pivot to video which was Buzzfeed’s big bet doesn’t appear to be paying any dividends in the UK at least, nor will it until advertisers value the audience. If as, Guido suspects, they have a primarily youthful audience they will not be able to command rates much above Facebook, which means thin margins. Guido has been trying to figure out how to make video or podcasts commercially viable and concluded that until advertisers create audio or video content that needs distribution to his audience, it just won’t be profitable. The Spectator uses their excellent podcast output as a gateway drug to becoming a subscriber, Business Insider and HuffPo are generating significant revenue with sponsored videos. The Economist is very successfully monetising their podcast audience to the tune of millions from corporate advertisers. The Economist demonstrates that if advertisers can be shown you have a valuable audience, they will pay. Buzzfeed’s problem is that their audience is the same “trash audience” that can be bought off Facebook or Google for pennies…
