The Rise and Fall of BuzzFeed News: A Retrospective.
Ben Smith's new book "Traffic" explores the rise and fall of BuzzFeed and Gawker, two digital publishing giants of the 2010s. While both companies were once seen as the future of media, BuzzFeed has struggled to remain a sustainable company and recently announced the shutdown of its Pulitzer Prize-winning hard-journalism division. Smith's book delves into the delusions and rivalries that characterized the race to go viral, ultimately concluding that the pursuit of immense audiences with free content was a doomed business strategy. The legacy of BuzzFeed serves as a cautionary tale about overreliance on traffic, while established media businesses and new start-ups have embraced subscriptions and paywalls as a more sustainable model.