BuzzFeed cuts about a third of its staff, hitting HuffPost and Tasty
New owner Byron Allen cut roughly 180 people, about 35% of BuzzFeed, weeks after buying the near-bankrupt company for $120 million. He wants to pivot it to free streaming and AI. So where does a text site like HuffPost land in that?
BuzzFeed taught the whole internet how to go viral. The quiz about which sandwich you are. The listicle you sent the group chat at 2 a.m. For about a decade, everybody was copying BuzzFeed.
This week it cut a third of itself.
What got cut
A filing on July 27 laid it out. Around 180 jobs gone, roughly 35% of what was left. The cuts run across everything — the main site, the news outlet HuffPost, the recipe brand Tasty, the film and TV studio.
BuzzFeed was already down to about 510 people. Call it 330 when the dust settles.
The memo said what these always say. Important changes, path to sustainable growth, worked through every scenario to save as many jobs as they could. You’ve read it before. The one hard number underneath it: about $30 million a year in savings.
The company was nearly gone
Nobody guts a company by a third over one bad quarter. This was closer to the edge than that.
In March, BuzzFeed told its own investors there was “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” That’s the accounting world’s polite way of saying the business might not make it to Christmas. It was $58.4 million in debt and losing something like $15 million every three months.
Enter Byron Allen. The comedian who built himself into a media mogul bought control for $120 million in May and put cash in fast to stop the bleeding. Jonah Peretti, who’d run the place for two decades, stepped aside as CEO. He’s President of BuzzFeed AI now, which is a sentence worth sitting with.
Allen runs it now. The layoff is the first thing he’s done with it.
Allen doesn’t want a magazine
When he bought in, Allen said the quiet part out loud — BuzzFeed should be “chasing YouTube and the other big tech platforms.” Free streaming. User-made video. The stuff his empire already does, over at Allen Media Group, with The Weather Channel and a stack of local stations and ad-supported streaming channels.
He’s a TV-and-streaming operator. Always has been. A guy like that doesn’t look at a website full of writers and see the future.
And the rescue doesn’t close the gap anyway. The cut saves about $30 million a year. The losses were running near $60 million a year. Trim thirty off a sixty-million hole and you’ve still got a hole. Whatever this is, it’s not the last round.
The pipe that fed BuzzFeed got shut off
There’s a bleak logic to BuzzFeed of all companies going down this way.
It went public in 2021 worth $1.5 billion, the golden child of digital media, living proof that viral content could be a real business. Then it started falling. Shut down its Pulitzer-winning news division in 2023. Sold Complex. Shed staff, over and over, for years.
What made BuzzFeed was traffic, and specifically Facebook firing millions of people at a quiz about sandwiches.
That firehose got turned off.
Social platforms quit sending readers anywhere, Google started answering questions on its own results page, and now AI reads you the article so you never open it. The referral economy BuzzFeed was built on got dismantled by the exact platforms that built it.
It’s not alone in the wreckage, either. The BBC’s cutting 2,000 jobs. The Washington Post cut a third of its business earlier this year. Same broken pipe, one newsroom after another. BuzzFeed’s just the most fitting corpse, because it was the purest version of the thing that stopped working.
So is HuffPost toast?
Straight answer first: no, not right now. HuffPost got hammered in this round, but nothing in the filing says it’s closing. Cut hard, still standing.
The longer answer is where it gets uncomfortable.
HuffPost is a text newsroom. Its new owner talks about streaming and AI and basically nothing else. It sits inside a company that just told its writers, with a third of the layoffs, that writing isn’t the plan — and that’s still $30 million short of breaking even, so there’s likely more coming.
Run down that list and a news site is the thing that fits worst and costs the most.
Nobody’s switched off the lights on HuffPost. But if you worked there, you wouldn’t sleep great this week.
BuzzFeed spent ten years teaching the internet a trick. It’s being handed to someone who wants to do that trick with video and machines, and the people who invented it are carrying boxes to their cars.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Variety / The Hollywood Reporter — the 180 layoffs, the 35% figure, the 510-employee base, the $29–32M savings, and the leadership memo
Deadline — Allen’s “chasing YouTube” comments, the free-streaming pivot, and Peretti’s move to President of BuzzFeed AI
The New York Times (via GV Wire) — the $58.4M debt, the going-concern warning, and the acquisition terms
Press Gazette — the broader 2026 journalism layoff tally, including the BBC and Washington Post cuts
HotAir / layoffhedge — the $15M quarterly loss against the $30M projected savings, and BuzzFeed’s 2021 IPO valuation