MOUSETRAP

In 2013, Jonah Peretti blew up a nearly half-billion-dollar Disney-BuzzFeed deal—then rode the digital media wave until it crashed

- Ben Smith

BY THE END of 2013, BuzzFeed was having it all. Our traffic hit 130 million unique visitors a month, riding Facebook’s relentless growth. Some of our competitors had begun to imitate everything we did, which mostly amounted to making lists. Others promised to do the same thing we were, but without the embarrassing memes. In Silicon Valley, an ambitious former Goldman Sachs banker named Carlos Watson persuaded an old friend, Laurene Powell Jobs, to finance a website called Ozy that would aim to be a smarter, slicker, more socially conscious BuzzFeed. And in that frothy moment, it seemed to make sense for America’s best media company, and its safest brand, to buy us.

Disney, to the degree it had been aware of BuzzFeed at all, had noticed the rather generous interpretation of fair use of its copyrights in items like “Which Disney Princess Are You?” But Disney was also scrambling to figure out how it fit into a rapidly changing digital world, and in the spring of 2013, Ben Sherwood, the former wunderkind producer turned president of ABC News, which Disney owned, sat with the company’s chief executive, Bob Iger, at the Coral Tree Café in Brentwood and asked him if he’d ever heard of BuzzFeed. Iger said he had but hadn’t really looked deeply into it. Sherwood explained that ABC News, in his view, had fallen dangerously out of sync with the times as corporate media lumbered toward what would be referred to in conference room PowerPoints as “digital transformation.” What the place really needed, he said, was a DNA transfer.