BuzzFeed Gets $50 Million Investment to Become ‘Preeminent Media Company’
Entertainment website BuzzFeed got $50 million more for its future plan to become one of the major media companies. Venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz funded $46.3 million to make it BuzzFeed's most successful funding campaign so far.
Andreessen Horowitz investor Chris Dixon said that BuzzFeed would "emerge from this period as a preeminent media company." "We're presently in the midst of a major technological shift in which, increasingly, news and entertainment are being distributed on social networks and consumed on mobile devices," Dixon wrote in a blog.
Dixon compared BuzzFeed with iconic media figures like Viacom, CBS and Time. "Many of today's great media companies were built on top of emerging technologies," he wrote, "Examples include Time Inc. which was built on color printing, CBS which was built on radio, and Viacom which was built on cable TV."
BuzzFeed claimed to value itself around $1 billion, according to earlier reports. There were other reports in April that claimed that the entertainment website was in talks with the Walt Disney Company. Disney apparently refused to pay $1 billion which BuzzFeed demanded during that time.
BuzzFeed has managed to get $96.3 million so far since 2008. According to reports, BuzzFeed will invest more on rich media content in the future. There will be more investments in acquisitions, in-house incubator for tech start-ups and online videos. Andreessen Horowitz has so far invested in big media companies like Skype, Pinterest, Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook.
Dixon said that the company he had invested in took the Internet seriously. He said that older formats like videos, photos and longer essays were being replaced by Internet formats like tweets, animated GIFs, pins and lists. He also said that the entertainment website had 150 million visitors in a month. BuzzFeed will earn "triple digit millions" in 2014, he predicted.
BuzzFeed will reportedly introduce new sections of content as it would add more value to its video arm, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, based in Los Angeles.
Contact the writer: s.mukhopadhyay@ibtimes.com.au