Niche is the Future of Scale

Despite BuzzFeed pumping over 300% last week on the news that it would be creating quizzes using ChatGPT, it would be hard for anyone to look at this company and say it was a resounding success. The same can be said for Vice and many of the other fast-scaling, fast-falling media companies from the last decade.

I was at dinner a few nights ago with a number of media operators and investors, and the topic of BuzzFeed, Vice, Mashable, Mic, and many of these former media darlings came up. And one person at the table asked: “What happened? Why didn’t they work?”