Dao Nguyen, the trailblazing publisher of BuzzFeed since 2014, has stepped down amid an overall shift in strategy, Adweek reported in an exclusive.
BuzzFeed, which a decade ago was deemed “one of the fastest growing media companies ever” by Forbes, has more recently faced the headwinds of a decelerating digital advertising market and changes in how audiences access content, its CEO Jonah Peretti said in a memo earlier this year in announcing the shuttering of the Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News.
In the latest shift, as reported by Adweek on Wednesday, BuzzFeed will run its commercial and editorial operations along its indvidual brands instead across the BuzzFeed network as a whole.
“BuzzFeed Inc. has been, from the beginning, premised on the idea of a large network that is powerful and valuable,” Nguyen said in announcing she will be leaving the company after 11 years, according to the Adweek report.
“But what has happened in the past two years is that with the fragmentation of audiences, the advertising market challenges and that squeeze from the big tech platforms, the network’s value, and specifically the value of distributed-only audiences, has been rapidly diminishing, and now it’s approaching zero, and some might argue that its value is in fact negative,” she said according to Adweek.
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“If you think about it, if there has been anyone at the company who has embodied this idea of the ‘network,’ it has been me,” Nguyen told staff, the report said. “So it makes sense for my tenure to end here.”
Before becoming publisher, Nguyen was manager of BuzzFeed’s data science team, during a period when the site’s unique monthly visitors increased fivefold.
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