Winning the attention race did not make BuzzFeed profitable

Evidence

Not that BuzzFeed was terribly profitable. It lost money for most of its early years, only began to turn a profit in 2013, and never exceeded 10 million (while hardly a fair comparison, Apple's iTunes store alone, also in the content business, and not considered highly profitable, has been estimated to clear 1 billion in profit per year). Its fortunes reflected the still-low price of digital ads; BuzzFeed’s annual ad revenues of roughly 100 million were still far less than, say, People magazine (about 1 billion). — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1073

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the scale of traditional media revenue, an important corrective to common assumptions about the digital attention economy’s profitability. — connects to: Early internet buzz did not yet translate into commercial success — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 191; Competitive attention markets degrade quality while profits shrink. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1078; Web metrics incentivized traffic and clickbait over prestige and quality (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Early internet buzz did not yet translate into commercial success #corroborates (0.82) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 191
• BuzzFeed accidentally unified trivia and news through the same viral machinery #expands (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 518
• Web metrics incentivized traffic and clickbait over prestige and quality #expands (0.75)
• Competitive attention markets degrade quality while profits shrink. #complicates (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1078