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A Shift in the Media Landscape: NBC Invests in Buzzfeed

posted by takyon on Thursday August 20 2015, @12:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the social-media-bubble dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

[translation mine] The deal is official: NBC Universal has invested $200 million in the website "Buzzfeed." The roughly 180 million Euro is a stock transaction and should clear the way to a strategic partnership, according to the companies.

"Buzzfeed" and NBC Universal want among other things to cooperate on reporting for the 2016 Olympic Games. The broadcaster NBC holds the rights to coverage for the Olympics in the USA. To the media group also belongs a Hollywood studio, that recently produced box office hits like "Jurassic World" and "Minions." NBC Universal is itself owned by the American cable giant Comcast.
...
In the past weeks NBC Universal has also invested $200 million in the online media company Vox, to which the blog "Re/code" and the tech website "The Verge" belong. The deal awarded Vox shares valued at $1.1 billion.

Traditional media companies have merged with online media before, such as the Time-Warner/AOL deal and News Corporation's acquisition of MySpace. Can it work this time, or are the cultures of the two realms fundamentally incompatible?

Reuters.

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  • (Score: 1) by meustrus on Thursday August 20 2015, @01:39PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday August 20 2015, @01:39PM (#225374)

    Traditional media companies have merged with online media before, such as the Time-Warner/AOL deal and News Corporation's acquisition of MySpace. Can it work this time, or are the cultures of the two realms fundamentally incompatible?

    Funny thing about those deals mentioned: in both cases the purchased "new media" ended up tanking while the out-of-touch "old media" continues to survive to this day. We all know it can't last forever. Old media survives greatly on the goodwill of older folks who'd be just happy to keep reading a newspaper or watching the nightly news as they have always done. And they will die off - eventually. Of course "older" in this context basically means 40+. So it will take a while. In the meantime, very few internet companies have survived more than about 5 years, and the out-of-touch dinosaurs keep managing to buy them out - at huge expense - at the peak of their business. I don't think Time-Warner had anything to do with AOL losing the core of its business. The merger just managed to happen right at the beginning of AOL's irrelevance. Anybody on the ground would have said the idea was short-sighted and dumb. Too bad nobody on the board of directors had any insight into their own industry.

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    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?