Jonah Peretti on Why He Sold BuzzFeed and His AI Future
· Nilay Patel
Jonah Peretti sat down for what might be his last interview as BuzzFeed CEO. Days before they spoke, he agreed to sell a 52 percent stake in the company to Byron Allen for $120…
Jonah Peretti sat down for what might be his last interview as BuzzFeed CEO. Days before they spoke, he agreed to sell a 52 percent stake in the company to Byron Allen for $120 million. Allen, who owns The Weather Channel and other media assets, will take over as CEO. Peretti is stepping into a new role as president of BuzzFeed AI. The deal is something of a lifeline. BuzzFeed was once valued at $1.6 billion, but last quarter the company warned it was at risk of running out of cash.
Peretti was refreshingly open about where things went wrong. He admitted that the old bet on social platforms paying for viral content worked for a while but didn't last. Facebook and others paid millions for video and news, then pulled back. Peretti still thinks that was a mistake on their part. He argued the platforms could have spent a couple billion dollars a year to sustain a healthy media ecosystem. Instead, they chose to prioritize profit and let an "army of teenagers" who work for free replace professional content creators.
The conversation turned heavily toward AI. Peretti is clearly excited about BuzzFeed's new direction. He talked about BF Island, a new app that blends meme generation with social messaging, and Conjure, a camera app with daily challenges. He sees AI as a way to build entirely new products, not just cheaper versions of old ones. When pressed on Byron Allen's claim that BuzzFeed will now "chase YouTube" using AI, Peretti dodged specifics but hinted at combining Allen's deals and production muscle with new technology to create something different.
There's a sense of bittersweet reflection here. Peretti acknowledged he probably should have sold to Disney for $650 million back in 2013, or gone public sooner without buying Complex. But he also defended the independent years, when BuzzFeed was a genuine cultural force. Now he's handing the CEO job to a "deals era" executive while he goes all in on AI products. The question is whether Gen Z, who broadly dislikes AI, will embrace the apps he's building. Peretti's answer: they will love the games, not the technology underneath. We'll see if he's right.