Online media outlet BuzzFeed Inc. reportedly is planning to go public next year.
Media site Axios cited unnamed industry sources about the closely held digital media company's strategy to launch an initial public offering of stock in the wake of Snap's market debut.
“The widely (and poorly) copied BuzzFeed, which began as a "great cat site" and now has foreign correspondents and a massive BuzzFeed Motion Pictures studio in L.A., mastered the art of sharable content and became a defining brand of the Internet age,” Axios reported.
Axios noted that BuzzFeed Chief Executive Jonah Peretti has turned down past offers from media companies.
BuzzFeed, whose investors include Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal, is best known for online list-based articles and quizzes and is trying to better attract more young internet-focused audiences who have different consumption patterns from their parents.
BuzzFeed is one of the largest pure-play digital websites, claiming to reach some 200 million users worldwide.
With its recent expansion, the group says some 45 percent of traffic now comes from outside the United States.
BuzzFeed, founded in 2006 by Huffington Post co-founder Peretti, was known for offbeat "shareable" news but has been investing in new staff and technology as it expands globally.
The site's traffic has lured big-name advertisers like General Electric Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. Unlike traditional news sources, which have relied on banner ads, BuzzFeed established itself by making sponsored versions of its articles for advertisers, such as animated images that promoted Google+ Photos or a feature on winter attractions in New York that plugged the state lottery’s scratch-off games.
(Newsmax wires services the Associated Press, AFP, Bloomberg and Reuters contributed to this report).
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