The Biz Reaper

I have written quite a few times over the years about Byron Allen, the legendary television business model exploiter who has managed to build an island of misfit toys into a business empire of his own.

Allen is a unique figure in media, because he can effectively maximize distressed assets—most infamously of late, the time slot soon to be vacated by Stephen Colbert.

But it’s not like he’s necessarily in it for the art of the whole thing; he is a man who understands business models in distress and how to execute on them. Which is why his decision to acquire BuzzFeed feels like something of an admission of how far BuzzFeed has fallen.

Jonah Peretti, until now BuzzFeed’s leader, had this to say about his new boss:

Byron’s vision, operational experience, and long-term commitment to premium content makes him exceptionally well-positioned to lead BuzzFeed and HuffPost into our next phase of growth. And personally, I’m thrilled Byron is taking over “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s” time slot, and highly confident that his relationships with talent will bring some incredible stars to the BuzzFeed platform.

(He’s sticking around, BTW, as president of BuzzFeed AI, which sounds like the business-world equivalent of becoming the United States Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.)

While it’s unlikely he’d be singing Allen’s praises in any other situation, Peretti must be feeling a massive sense of relief right now.

It’s been a bit overshadowed by the messiness of what’s happened since, but BuzzFeed started out essentially as a petri dish for experimental media ideas, only for massive VC funding to push that idea into the background. Recent moves by Peretti seem to suggest he’s been wanting to bring some of that spirit back to the company he founded, most notably in the form of his Anti-SNARF Manifesto from last year.

As an experiment in what it takes to build virality and generate attention online, BuzzFeed has been a massive success. As a company, it’s seen better days. And one might argue that, because he’s been stuck trying to steady the ship, Peretti has been kept away from what he’s actually good at—building inventive digital publishing ideas. One hopes that, as far as his new title goes, “AI” is merely shorthand for “being creative.”

Problem is, his path for getting to that point required him to make a deal with a guy whose latter-day career is associated with acquiring dusty old legacy media brands. It’s a rough association on the surface. Story-wise and money-wise, it suggests BuzzFeed’s best moments are in the past.

That’s far from what this company once represented in the media ecosystem, but on the other hand, it’s certainly a better fate than what happened to, say, Vice. After all, there was a financial payday in the end, and it does allow BuzzFeed to finally get out of the humiliating death spiral of their time on the stock market.

Allen, The Biz Reaper himself, is not a deeply creative mind like Peretti is (if he was, Comics Unleashed would be a better show), but more of an old-school entertainer with business chops. But as strange as it sounds, that may be to BuzzFeed’s advantage. The company spent years treading water, attempting to shore itself up with acquisitions that only made things worse from a financial standpoint. (I will note that HuffPost was cofounded by Peretti, but it came with a lot of debt.)

Meanwhile, its diaspora is out there winning Emmys, reshaping independent media, and becoming media moguls in their own right. Something about this model is not working, and as Simon Owens suggested in his newsletter today, it might just be a coherent YouTube strategy. It’s telling that the most memorable product the company has produced in the past five years was something it acquired, then sold: Hot Ones.

Sometimes you just need a boring guy who knows how to make deals at the helm, and Allen is probably that. Yes, his rep as the guy you see when your business model is on the fritz precedes him. But given that Peretti spent years grabbing every loose branch he could see in hopes of rekindling a fire, maybe a guy who knows about internal combustion might be the better bet.

BuzzFeed may never be a central viral force ever again. But it might have a chance to become a successful business again.