The US website BuzzFeed will assume control over its local rival, HuffPost. As HuffPost’s mother company, Verizon will take over a minority stake in a new group set up with BuzzFeed, without revealing the price.

Within the partnership, BuzzFeed can also use Verizon’s technical and commercial capacities for its development.

This operation is another sign of consolidation of the free news sector on the Internet, which has been struggling for several years.

Based on advertising, which has virtually the only source of revenue, those sites are powerless compared to the Internet giants.

According to eMarketer, Google, Facebook and Amazon thus collected more than 60% of online advertising revenue in 2019.

BuzzFeed and HuffPost had to lay off staff to adapt to business conditions in the market.

In 2018, a BuzzFeed co-founder, Jonah Peretti, mentioned a merger with one or more market players, including Vice, Vox, Refinery29 and Group Nine, but not HuffPost, which he set up in 2005.

In 2017, Huffington Post became HuffPost, as one of the first ‘clean players’ in the web news sector, with only a website, without a newspaper.

It remained closer to the traditional news website format than BuzzFeed, which was allegedly established to boost turnover and ‘feed’ SoMe.

Now diverse, with video, online games and business partners, BuzzFeed is significantly bigger than HuffPost.

Source: Beta