BuzzFeed SPAC: Here’s What You Need to Know

BuzzFeed could hit markets as early as the first week of December if all goes smoothly.

The digital media giant plans to merge with blank-check company 890 5th Avenue Partners. Shareholders will convene for a vote on Dec. 2.

If the BuzzFeed SPAC goes through, The New York-based publisher will also snap up the global youth network Complex Networks as part of the deal, which it claims boasts “unparalleled engagement among millennials and Gen Z.”

What can you expect when BZFD begins trading on the Nasdaq?

We unpack the latest news and the alternative data below.

The revenue picture

The most striking part of the BuzzFeed SPAC story from the initial announcement was it’s implied $1.5 billion valuation.

After all, in July 2020, BuzzFeed laid off 50 employees as it struggled to replace lucrative revenue deals lost during the pandemic. However, in Q221, revenue surged 51% YoY thanks to accelerating ad growth and commerce revenues. And Q3 2021, revenue continued to climb due to display ads.

CEO Jonah Peretti explained, “Our impressive Q3 results highlight the strength of our diversified, cross-platform business model. The 39% year-on-year improvement in our advertising revenue drove another quarter of significant topline growth that continues to translate into improved profitability.”

The powerful growth also meant doubling of EBITDA year-over-year.

Turning to Similarweb’s data, which processes billions of digital signals every day, we pulled the latest digital insights on BuzzFeed’s website performance.

Ad platform popularity

It comes as no surprise that there was also a clear spike in traffic to BuzzFeed’s advertiser platform, which we can monitor via the site advertise.buzzfeed.com.

As the screenshot below shows, despite the pullback from July – October, visits to the site remain significantly higher than at the start of the year.

The difference is particularly stark if you look further back and compare October 2021 to January 2020. Nevertheless, investors should keep a close eye on this trendline, which has been inching lower since July 2021.

Other key metrics to monitor include traffic and engagement. After all, advertiser interest is determined by traffic trends, and also audience engagement.

Worldwide traffic trends

We use monthly unique visitors (MUVs) as a powerful indication of the growth and popularity of a specific website. Note that unique visitors do not include repeat visits which enables us to assess the actual reach of a website.

Here we compared the traffic to buzzfeed.com to some of its key rivals, including vice.com, vox.com, and mashable.com. Bear in mind that BuzzFeed snapped up huffpost.com from Verizon Media in February 2021.

Across the entire competitive set, we see website traffic worldwide has been trending down since 2019.

While traffic to buzzfeed.com has trended almost consistently lower over the last two years, despite peaks in traffic in April 2020 and the end of 2020, it hasn’t fallen as dramatically as others sites in the group.

Monthly unique visitors in October 2021 were down 26% in comparison to October 2019.

Huffpost.com traffic experienced an even sharper MUV plunge of -28% over this same two-year period, while vox.com saw MUVs fall -34%, vice.com -48%, and mashable.com over -44%.

So while traffic is trending down worldwide, BuzzFeed is still beating its competition.

U.S. traffic trends

Honing in on U.S., we see that while traffic patterns still show the same downward trend. However, the degree of deceleration looks to be slowing down on a YoY basis over the past few months.

In the chart below you can see that in October 2021, U.S. YoY MUVs came in at -11% YoY easily, which shows improvement from April 2021 YoY decline of -25%.

Engagement metrics

Here we measure up the engagement metrics for five of the key digital media companies. Encouragingly, BuzzFeed takes the crown on every single metric, except for unique visitor ratio and bounce rate where BuzzFeed’s own HuffPost takes first place.

If we break this down a bit further, we can see how average visit duration (one of the most important indicators of audience engagement) tracks over time for BuzzFeed vs. rivals. Note how the average visit duration is considerably longer for both BuzzFeed and HuffPost vs. Vox, Vice, and Mashable.

Bottom line

What can you expect for the BuzzFeed SPAC?

Keep a close eye on the industry at large to track the latest trends. Using Similarweb Investor Intelligence, you can surface powerful insights to monitor any company’s performance in near real-time and invest in stocks with greater confidence.