Why BuzzFeed and Vice Couldn’t Make News Work

Not sure about Vice, but for me BuzzFeed for news is like talking to Stormy Daniels about virginity. If that&#x27;s what you&#x27;re doing, you&#x27;re confused.<p>There&#x27;s already an over abundancy of half-assed &quot;news&quot; sources (many them inspired by the BF f-integrity-make-it-viral model).<p>&quot;I&#x27;m upset BF News has tanked,&quot; said no one ever.

I think the answer is much simpler:<p>- they basically started as listicle sites<p>- pivoting from silliness to &quot;seriousness&quot; is <i>hard</i> ... and when &#x27;everyone thinks you&#x27;re a joke&#x27; ... they&#x27;re going to continue to <i>treat</i> you like a joke<p>that ... and they weren&#x27;t very discriminating as to who&#x2F;what they allowed to advertise

Because they produce digital content, and content is getting commoditized, competing with everything from other news sites, blogposts, message board posts, youtube videos, soon LLM output, you don&#x27;t want to be in the digital content business.<p>Owning a digital content platform however...

They went from dangerous, interesting, and rebellious to the status quo. Which slowly destroyed their competitive advantage. Why would I read Vice when there are 100 other news sites with almost the same content?