POST 019

BuzzFeed Is Only the Beginning

PUBLISHED: AUG 19, 2014
READING TIME: 5 MIN
TOPIC: MEDIA / TECHNOLOGY

BuzzFeed just raised $50 million and is valued at $850 million. Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most respected VC firms, made the investment and has predicted a changing media landscape that could grow 10x-100x in the next five years.

News has always been received in a quick, glancing kind of way. Newspapers were published daily or weekly, sold cheaply, and intended to be skimmed and dismissed. Now, these publications have moved to digital, but have not transformed with the new medium. It’s near impossible to read a newspaper article on a cell phone while boarding the subway.

More and more people spend their time watching television shows or playing games while in transport. Reading a digital magazine or newspaper article is too time consuming and too inconvenient to win the battle for attention. In order to survive, news needs to transform into something more interesting.

The news media is in a unique position to harness amazing profit growth over the next decade. With maturing social sharing sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube as well as more up and coming sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat, the industry now has a solid and growing foundation on which to build.

Furthermore, with the advent of crypto currency like Bitcoin, profitability is becoming less and less of an issue. With Bitcoin, users can pay fractions of a dollar or even cents per webpage view. It is doubtful that a user would opt to not pay 5 cents to read an article documenting the growth of the US police state through an interactive graph and animated video.

Secondly, just as magazines and newspapers sported amazing, high quality advertisements in their heyday, I believe we can propel the online advertising market forward into a second advertising golden age by only accepting the most high quality advertisements from the best brands.

Lastly, I see a change in how contributors and editors will function. As news media moves from purely written or filmed accounts and into a more interactive and engaging format, I see contributors creating content more and more by means of coding. No longer will journalists be able to only rely upon specialized knowledge and a solid grasp of language. They will also need the ability to code and truly “develop” a story.

We need not fear a future where news media is dead. I see our current stage of news media as a temporary fix for a disrupted industry that has yet to formulate an answer. Just as Marc Andreessen said, look for this to change over the next five years and for phenomenal growth in the industry.