The economics of offering free hosting for user’s content and monetizing based on tracking and advertising is going to become more and more expensive for businesses. The reason for this is that tracking is there’s going to be more and more data, the competition is going to be fiercer (especially competition from self-hosted options), and ad-block is going to increasingly cut into profits (especially amongst “millennials”) . It came as no surprise to me to read Frederic Filloux‘s excellent article:

Leaked Buzzfeed numbers sent a jolt to the many who dreamed of jumping on the distributed content bandwagon. This particular genre of advertising business model might have been overrated.

It was a bad week in the distributed content sector where gazillions “content views” were once touted as the new digital digital bonanza. On April 12th, The FT.com reported that Buzzfeed, until now the genre’s gold standard, had halved its 2016 revenue projections from $500m to $250m, after making $150m in 2015, 30% lower than expected.

I struggle to sympathize with BuzzFeed because I find their brand of clickbait so pernicious to an Internet of quality dialogue, and I have to constantly filter out BuzzFeed from Reddit and Facebook, etc. What more, but sometimes I filter it out incorrectly, because they do have quality longform as well.