Pivot to video
One of the company’s nascent ideas, BuzzFeed Distributed, will be a team of 20 people producing content that lives entirely on other popular platforms, like Tumblr, Instagram or Snapchat.[20][21] By December 2017, following a sale to Ziff Davis, Mashable retreated from this focus on video; Bernard Gershon, president of GershonMedia, said that the announcement of many such "pivots" were actually aimed primarily at investors.Vocativ laid off at least 20 staff, including its entire newsroom, explaining that "as the industry evolves, we are undertaking a strategic shift to focus exclusively on video content that will be distributed via social media and other platforms.Less than two years earlier, MTV News had hired Grantland co-founder Dan Fierman to lead a significant investment in "longform" political and cultural reporting, but Fierman left in April 2017, and in June MTV announced it was "shifting resources into short-form video content more in line with young people's media consumption habits."[23] The move was ultimately unsuccessful, and Mic laid off the majority of its staff a year later before being sold to Bustle Media Group for a fraction of its former value.[42][43] In 2017, Journalist Brian Feldman said that "'Pivoting to video' has become a business strategy for digital publishers common enough in recent months to be a kind of cliché — a slick way to describe something else: layoffs.[45] In September 2016, Facebook admitted that it had reported artificially inflated numbers to its advertisers about how long viewers watched ads leading to an overestimation of 60-80%.