BuzzFeed to Acquire HuffPost From Verizon Media

BuzzFeed plans to acquire HuffPost, the companies announced Thursday, in a deal that would join a pair of digital media giants that have found themselves searching for readers and revenue as they have fallen prey to some of the same difficulties that once afflicted newspapers and magazines.

HuffPost will become the property of its onetime rival as part of larger stock deal between Verizon Media, the owner of HuffPost, and BuzzFeed.

“We’re excited about our partnership with Verizon Media and mutual benefits that will come from syndicating content across each other’s properties, collaborating on innovative ad products and the future of commerce, and tapping into the strength and creativity of Verizon Media Immersive,” Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed founder and chief executive, said in a statement. Peretti got his start in digital media at HuffPost under its founder, Arianna Huffington, back when the site was called Huffington Post.

The companies said that, as part of the arrangement, Verizon Media will become a minority shareholder in BuzzFeed.

“Verizon Media’s strategy has evolved over the past two years to focus on our core strengths — ads, commerce, content and subscriptions,” Guru Gowrappan, Verizon Media chief executive, said in a statement. “We’ve created a powerhouse ecosystem, built on a trusted network, that delivers an end- to- end experience for consumers and advertisers. The partnership with BuzzFeed complements our road map while also accelerating our transformation and growth.”

The two websites will remain distinct from each other, each with its own editorial staff.

“The reason we were attracted to it is the brand and the audience,” Peretti said in an interview. “We want HuffPost to be more HuffPosty and BuzzFeed to be more BuzzFeedy; there’s not much audience overlap. These are different audiences they serve. On the editorial side and the consumer side, we want to have a lot of independence and autonomy for HuffPost and for it to determine its own brand.”

Speaking again of HuffPost, Peretti added, “We are going to hire an editor- inchief.” ( The site’s executive editor is Hillary Frey; the previous editor- in- chief, from 2016 until March of this year, was Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times editor who left HuffPost to become the head of content at the podcasting company Gimlet Media.)

The merger of BuzzFeed and HuffPost is a homecoming of sorts for both outlets. Along with Huffington and media executive and investor Kenneth Lerer, Peretti was part of the team that created the original Huffington Post in 2005.

The next year, Peretti, a scientist of the web with a perennial interest in which pieces of online content prove most engaging to readers, started BuzzFeed as an experimental side project, working out of a small office in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

He was still the chief technology officer at Huffington Post at the time. Steeped in the Google algorithm, Peretti and the site’s editors helped engineer Huffington Post into an online force that featured a new kind of journalism — unapologetically web- native, complete with listicles, hot- take opinion pieces, slide shows and curiosity inducing headlines — that drew clicks from millions of readers in the years before Twitter and other social media sites took charge of the internet discourse.

Peretti left HuffPost in 2011, after it was sold to AOL for $ 315 million.