Inside Jonah Peretti’s Rollup Playbook
A plan to go public. An acquisition of Complex Networks. After sitting on the sidelines for years, BuzzFeed’s CEO is cranking up his deal making. But will his vision of media consolidation satisfy Wall Street?
In 2018, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti issued a cri de coeur to the digital media industry, telling his fellow moguls that all of them, BuzzFeed included, needed to start merging so they could more effectively stand up to Google and Facebook, the internet’s advertising powerhouses. But then a funny thing happened: Peretti went dark on the deal-making front as rivals Vox Media, Vice Media and Group Nine Media heeded his call over the next year with a series of acquisitions of other media properties.
Peretti is on the sidelines no more. BuzzFeed is negotiating a roughly $300 million acquisition of digital lifestyle publisher Complex Networks from Hearst and Verizon, an agreement that would further bulk up BuzzFeed’s business following its acquisition last November of HuffPost from Verizon. And he’s in talks to take BuzzFeed public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, which would help it fund the Complex acquisition.
Peretti plans to keep up the acquisitions with the vision of turning BuzzFeed into a holding company for media brands, each of them operating independently, say people familiar with the plan. Some digital media properties, such as Scary Mommy, a popular blog for parents, have already approached BuzzFeed about acquiring them, the people say (BuzzFeed passed; Scary Mommy didn’t respond to a request for comment).