Buzzfeed to acquire HuffPost in Verizon deal

Buzzfeed Inc. will be acquiring HuffPost, formerly the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal reports. The acquisition is part of a stock deal with Verizon Media, HuffPosts's current parent company.

Under the terms of the deal, Verizon will maintain a minority stake in HuffPost and will make a cash investment in Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed and HuffPost will jointly syndicate content and explore advertising opportunities together according to the deal.

While both HuffPost and Buzzfeed were growing rapidly in the mid-2010s, their growth has been stunted in recent years by declining revenue and readership, leading to both companies laying off employees and Buzzfeed shutting down their operations in Australia and the UK completely.

Such decline has been accelerated by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, reducing advertising dollars spent on social media as many businesses remain shuttered. The decline in advertisement revenue adds pressure as companies such as Facebook and Google continue to accrue most of the revenue made from advertising.

Buzzfeed and Huffpost said in a joint statement that their audiences overlap and that the acquisition and subsequent coordination will benefit both companies.

The combined company will be run by Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of Buzzfeed. Peretti was a founder of the Huffington Post, making his acquisition of the online news aggregator a return to the past for him.

According to Verizon CEO Guru Gowrappan, he and Peretti came up with the idea of the two companies working together at a meeting in Las Vegas. The initial idea was not for Buzzfeed to acquire HuffPost, however, and the deal was reached after several months of talks.

"BuzzFeed was the right partner," Gowrappan said.

Verizon Media acquired the Huffington Post in 2015 when the company acquired AOL for $4.4 billion. AOL had purchased the news aggregator four years earlier for $315 million. Other properties of Verizon Media include Yahoo! and TechCrunch.