BuzzFeed reports Q2 EPS (18c) vs. (63c) last year

Reports Q2 revenue $46.9M vs. $62.1M last year. CEO Jonah Peretti says: “Before I get into specifics about the quarter, I want to provide a bit of context. As I’ve mentioned before, we take a long term approach to managing our business. This is why we’ve kept our world class tech and product teams intact, despite a tough market where many of our competitors shed those costs to provide short term savings. We have a strong conviction that continuously experimenting and innovating with technology sets us up to thrive in the next era of the internet. We’ve always lived at the intersection of content and technology, and we’re increasingly leaning into the new technologies that are beginning to transform the media industry. I’m pleased to share that we are beginning to see the fruits of our experimentation and innovation. In particular, generative AI, interactive content formats, and enhanced personalization are starting to drive improvements in key metrics across our business. These improvements include more audience loyalty, more user logins, higher conversion on our commerce content, better targeting and growth in our advertising inventory, revenue growth in our most scalable lines of business, and improved profitability. By leaning into new technologies, we have also accelerated the pace of new product development, made our content creators more efficient and creative, and invited our audience to participate directly in AI-assisted content creation. We’ve already done much of the hard work that will enable us to do more of the fun consumer facing work moving forward. Since the start of the year, we’ve built foundational capabilities with the help of AI that now power internal content development tools, like our AI copilots, as well as consumer facing experiences, like our AI-assisted content generators. By leveraging a range of embedding techniques to represent our content, in conjunction with vector data stores and model fine-tuning capabilities, we have the right building blocks in place to recommend, remix, personalize, and generate new forms of media for our audiences. Our teams are very excited about the platform we’ve built, and even more excited about all the new things we’ll be able to launch in the coming months and years. We’ll share more with you in future earnings calls so you can track our progress.”