Is The Daily Wire about to become the next BuzzFeed?
Ben Shapiro’s company wants a $2 billion IPO while its subscribers shrink, its audience drops, and it shuts down divisions. That’s the same bet BuzzFeed made before it sold for parts. And in 2026, with conservative media on top, what makes the Daily Wire special?
The Daily Wire wants to be a $2 billion company. Its subscriber numbers, its layoffs, and its shut-down divisions all say otherwise. And if that combination sounds familiar, it’s because we just watched another digital media darling run the same playbook straight into a fire sale.
That company was BuzzFeed. It did not end well.
What’s happening at The Daily Wire
Here’s the news, per a report from Semafor.
The Daily Wire, the conservative media company Ben Shapiro co-founded in 2015, is hunting for at least $100 million in new investment. It’s been talking with a firm called Highmount Capital about a deal that would value the company at $750 million, and its bankers are floating a bigger dream: a $2 billion public stock offering, maybe within 18 months.
That’s the ambitious version. The numbers underneath it are shakier.
According to documents Semafor reviewed, the company’s paid subscriber base has dropped by more than a third from its peak, down to about 771,000, with basically no growth in two years. The company says it made $48 million in profit last year, but it’s been losing subscribers and struggling to keep the ones it has.
So the pitch is “fund our giant IPO,” while the actual business is shrinking. That’s a tension worth poking at.
The cuts tell the story
The pitch deck says growth. The last year and a half says something else.
The Daily Wire has been through two rounds of layoffs. The first hit in early 2025, cutting roughly a quarter of staff. The second came on May 1, 2026, and its size is disputed: an industry layoff tracker and former host Candace Owens claimed it was around half the staff, while the company’s editor-in-chief pushed back hard, saying it was “nowhere near 50%,” and a separate report put it near 13%. Either way, it was a real cut, the second in about a year.
The bigger tell is what got shut down entirely. In 2025, the company closed Bentkey, its children’s entertainment division, the one it had launched with fanfare as a conservative alternative to Disney. The whole staff was cut. Around the same time, co-founder Jeremy Boreing stepped down as co-CEO.
And the audience has slid. By some third-party estimates, Shapiro’s YouTube viewership is down sharply from its 2023 peak. Boreing has said the company once pulled in over $200 million a year. The contraction since then has been steep.
Why people are saying “BuzzFeed”
This is where the comparison comes in, and it’s not a cheap shot. The stories rhyme.
BuzzFeed was the digital media phenom of the 2010s. It cracked viral content, built a massive audience on social media, won a Pulitzer for its news division, and at its peak in 2016 was valued at $1.7 billion. It looked unstoppable.
Then the ground shifted. Social platforms changed their algorithms, the traffic dried up, and money got tight. BuzzFeed went public in 2021 through a SPAC at a $1.5 billion valuation, the same “go public and cash in” dream the Daily Wire is chasing now.
It went badly. The stock cratered. By 2024 the whole company was worth about $37 million, down from $1.7 billion. It shut down its award-winning news division and started selling off pieces to survive.
How cheap BuzzFeed got is the scary part
Here’s the detail that should make any media company sweat.
In May 2026, BuzzFeed agreed to be bought by media mogul Byron Allen for about $120 million. And it’s stranger than even that number sounds: the deal was structured so Allen essentially paid around $20 million in upfront cash, plus a $100 million IOU, for control of a company once worth nearly two billion dollars.
A company that was supposed to be the future of media got sold for the price of a nice house. And notice the rhyme: BuzzFeed’s big symbolic retreat was shutting down its news division. The Daily Wire’s was shutting down Bentkey, its would-be Disney killer. Both closed the ambitious thing that was supposed to make them more than a website.
Here’s the thing: conservative media isn’t the underdog anymore
A few years ago, this story would’ve had a built-in hook: scrappy conservative upstart takes on the big liberal media machine. That framing doesn’t really work in 2026.
Rewind to 2017 or 2018, and the media-power story was the opposite. Legacy outlets and Silicon Valley platforms that mostly leaned left dominated the conversation, and conservative media outside Fox was often treated as a niche.
That’s changed.
Fox News has been the most-watched cable network in America for years, topping CNN and MSNBC. The Ellison family, who lean right, are about to close a deal giving them control of Warner Bros., CNN, HBO, and DC, on top of the Paramount and CBS empire they already run. There’s a huge, well-funded conservative podcast world now too.
Conservative media isn’t the scrappy outsider it was less than a decade ago.
Which raises an awkward question for the Daily Wire’s pitch: what makes it special? When it launched, being the buzzy new voice of the right was the whole selling point. But that lane is crowded now, with bigger and richer players in it. The thing that once made the Daily Wire stand out is exactly the thing it’s losing.
And the numbers show it. Conservative media is ascendant, and the Daily Wire is shrinking right in the middle of that boom. It’s not riding the wave. It’s getting passed by it.
Where the comparison fits, and where it doesn’t
To be fair, the two companies aren’t identical, and the differences matter.
The Daily Wire is actually profitable, which BuzzFeed struggled to be. It has a real paid-subscription business, not just an ad model at the mercy of social platforms. And it sells its own products, from supplements to chocolate, that bring in money outside of media. Those are genuine strengths BuzzFeed never had.
But the core warning sign is the same: a media company built heavily on a few star personalities, hitting a wall on growth, shutting down divisions, and reaching for a giant payday right as its audience slips. The Daily Wire leans on Shapiro the way BuzzFeed leaned on its viral feed.
And it’s got its own version of that risk. It’s been through public feuds and key departures, including the very public, very messy split between Shapiro and former star Candace Owens. When your business is built on personalities and the personalities start fighting in public, that’s a real crack in the foundation, the kind investors notice.
So, the next BuzzFeed?
Not necessarily. The Daily Wire is on firmer financial footing than BuzzFeed was, and a profitable subscription business is a much better starting point than BuzzFeed’s ad-dependent one. If it can stop the subscriber slide, the comparison falls apart.
But the shape of the risk is identical, and it’s why the BuzzFeed name keeps coming up. A media company hits peak buzz, builds a sky-high valuation on momentum, runs into a growth ceiling, starts cutting staff and closing divisions, and goes looking for a big IPO at the exact moment its audience starts shrinking. That’s the BuzzFeed pattern, and BuzzFeed is the reminder of how fast a billion-dollar media dream can become a $20 million garage sale.
The Daily Wire is betting it can sell investors the $2 billion dream before the shrinking-subscriber reality catches up. BuzzFeed made that same bet, and lost it. Whether the Daily Wire’s numbers can turn around before the clock runs out is the question worth watching, and right now they’re pointing the wrong way.
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Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
Hat Tips:
Semafor (June 23, 2026), Max Tani and Rohan Goswami reporting, which broke the funding story, verified for the $100 million raise, the $750 million valuation, the $2 billion IPO target, the 771,000 subscriber figure, and the $48 million profit
TheWrap and Barrett Media (May 1, 2026), verified for the May 2026 layoffs, the company’s “number of teams” statement, editor Brent Scher disputing the 50% figure, and Candace Owens’s claims
Celebrity Net Worth and Wikipedia (May 2026), verified for BuzzFeed’s $120 million Byron Allen sale, the ~$20 million upfront structure, the $1.7 billion peak, and the decline to $37 million by 2024
IBTimes and Britannia Daily (May 2026), verified for the Bentkey shutdown, Jeremy Boreing stepping down as co-CEO, the two-wave layoff timeline, the audience decline, and Boreing’s $200 million peak-revenue figure