We told you NBCUniversal was going to invest in BuzzFeed. Then we told you that the NBCUniversal/BuzzFeed deal was done.
BuzzFeed and NBCUniversal Tie the Knot, and Tease the Olympics
Get ready for the BuzzFeed Olympics. (Really.)
Asa Mathat for Re/code
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
And now the two companies are telling you about the deal.
No need to go into much detail, since the specifics are old news: NBCUniversal, the TV and film giant owned by Comcast, the cable TV giant, is putting $200 million into BuzzFeed in a deal that values the Web publisher at $1.5 billion.
At the same time (but announced last week), NBCUniversal also put $200 million into Vox Media, which owns this website. (Which means the Re/code staff have updated our ethics statements to acknowledge Comcast/NBCU’s minority stake in our parent company. Here’s mine, for example.)
It is worth noting that the NBCU/BuzzFeed press release says the two companies will work together on Olympics coverage, though it doesn’t say how. (NBCU also doesn’t say which Olympics. It owns the U.S. broadcast rights to the games through 2032, but I’m assuming they will start with the summer games in Rio next year.) When NBCU announced its deal with Vox Media, it didn’t mention anything about the Olympics, even though Vox Media’s biggest property is the SB Nation sports vertical.
The other point that’s interesting to me is that BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti specifically says his company wants to work with NBCU “to extend our reach to TV and film.” Peretti, who usually stresses that BuzzFeed works best in purely digital settings, has recently been floating the notion that his company is ready to work with conventional media after all. Now he’s underscoring the idea.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
