Reshab AgarwalBuzzfeed acquires the website Huffpost from Verizon Media as an attempt to boost its online presence. The deal about the ownership transfer of Huffpost from Verizon Media to Buzzfeed is a stock deal. Reports also say that Verizon is going to invest and become a minority stakeholder in the company. The companies also plan to work together by sharing content, explore monetization and more.
The history of the Huffington Post
About 10 years ago the Huffington Post was acquired by AOL for $315 million. It was a big acquisition at the time in the media world. And after some time, AOL was acquired by Verizon and everything came under their control. Verizon even acquired yahoo and named the combined organization as the “Oath”. There has been a lot of rumours regarding the sale of Huffpost, but last year Verizon discarded those by saying they are not making any sale.
The last few years haven’t been great for the company. It has been struggling a lot with its advertising and had to take many measures to reduce costs. It even tried to introduce a subscription option, but that did not pan out very well.
Buzzfeed’s motive behind the acquisition
Image Source: Campaign Monitor
One of the co-founders of Buzzfeed was also one of the founders of the Huffington Post. She said that she thought Huffpost will soon become one of the biggest News Media outlets. And since that hasn’t happened, seeing the potential of HuffPost, Buzzfeed has decided to acquire the company from Verizon. They also believe that Huffpost would bring in more traffic and users and help them with competing with others in this segment.
If we see it from Verizon’s side, then the sale was made because they were not able to grow their media companies. The company even declared everything worthless in 2018 and sold Tumblr, its blogging platform. The company even wanted to let go of Yahoo Finance but ended the search probably because no one wanted to buy.
Many independent media companies are making acquisitions in order to sustain and compete with big rivals. It isn’t easy after all to give tough competition in ad dollars to big rivals and hence consolidation is the key. What are your thoughts on the fact BuzzFeed acquires the website HuffPost? Let us know in the comments below. Also, if you found our content informative, do like and share it with your friends.
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