Byron Allen has acquired a majority stake in BuzzFeed and already named his next target: Starz. The 65-year-old media mogul laid out his ambitions in a wide-ranging interview with The Hollywood Reporter, describing a strategy built around free streaming, advertising revenue, and a willingness to force his way into boardrooms that would rather keep him out.
Allen paid $20 million in cash for the BuzzFeed stake, plus a promise of $100 million five years from now. The brand had been languishing on the Nasdaq. In 2014, founder Jonah Peretti reportedly turned down a $650 million offer from Disney. Allen picked up the wreckage for a fraction of that figure, and plans to fold BuzzFeed and HuffPost into a free streaming operation anchored by his existing platform, Local Now.
The deal's scope came into sharper focus through additional reporting. The New York Post reported that Allen, through Allen Family Digital, agreed to purchase roughly 52 percent of BuzzFeed, 40 million shares at $3 each, for $120 million total, a 265.9 percent premium to the stock's prior closing price. Allen will become CEO. BuzzFeed's first-quarter revenue had fallen 12.4 percent to $31.6 million, and its net loss widened to $15.1 million.
Allen's path to this point is not the standard private-equity biography. He started his company from his dining room table in 1993. He said he called roughly 1,200 television stations trying to sell syndicated programming. Stations told him no, 50 to 100 times each.
"After 50,000 'no's' I squeezed out 150 'yes's.'"
He described a period when his home went in and out of foreclosure, when his phone was shut off and he pitched TV stations from a payphone. Today, Allen Media Group claims about 74 shows in syndication and 13 hours of daily television programming. Allen said he has invested roughly $1 billion buying ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates around the country, including stations in Arizona, Iowa, and Michigan, swing-state markets where political advertising money flows heaviest.
In the last political cycle, the 2024 presidential race, Allen said his stations brought in almost $100 million in political ad revenue. He added that the stations he kept after selling off about a third of his portfolio for $171 million last year accounted for 93 to 94 percent of that haul. That is a businessman who knows exactly which assets to hold and which to shed, a calculation familiar to anyone watching consolidation battles in broadcasting.
Allen Media Group did go through major layoffs in 2024. Allen framed the cuts as overdue rightsizing, no different from what every media company faces in transition. He said he avoided layoffs during the pandemic, telling employees "people before profits," and that when cuts finally came, the company handled them "in a very thoughtful, humane way."
Allen's interest in BuzzFeed is not sentimental. He is not buying a newsroom. He is buying brand recognition and a user base to feed into a free, ad-supported streaming model.
"The world's two favorite words right now: 'Free' and 'streaming.' What I can do is I can take BuzzFeed and HuffPost and put it into the free streaming business with this asset that I've invested heavily in."
That asset is Local Now, a free streaming app that curates hyperlocal news, weather, sports, and traffic, geofenced to the user's zip code. Allen's vision pairs it with BuzzFeed and HuffPost to create a broader AVOD, advertising video on-demand, platform. He described his strategy in boxing terms: SVOD (subscription) is the left hook, AVOD (advertising) is the right hook. Land both, and you hold the title.
The Washington Times confirmed that Allen will serve as chairman and CEO of BuzzFeed, while Peretti moves to a new role as president of BuzzFeed AI. Allen said in a statement that the plan is to expand into free-streaming video, audio, and user-generated content, positioning BuzzFeed to chase YouTube.
Allen recounted a dinner with Netflix founder Reed Hastings in which Hastings admitted YouTube was the competitor that kept him up at night. The concern, as Allen relayed it: if YouTube starts delivering premium content, why would subscribers keep paying for Netflix? Allen appears to have taken that lesson and built his strategy around it, give viewers premium content for free and make advertisers foot the bill.
That bet runs counter to the subscription-first model that dominated the last decade of media. But Netflix itself has pivoted toward advertising and live sports, suggesting Allen may be reading the market correctly.
Allen is not waiting to digest BuzzFeed before moving on. In March, he spent $25 million to acquire Steve Mnuchin's 11 percent stake in Starz, making Allen the second-largest stockholder. He described the call with Mnuchin, his former banker from the OneWest Bank days, in blunt terms.
"He said, 'I'm not interested in selling at these prices.' I said, 'I didn't give you a price, just tell me what you want.' And he said, 'I want $25 million.' I said, 'OK, I'll take those shares for $25 million and we bought them.'"
Starz responded by adopting a "poison pill" plan shortly after Allen's buy-in, a standard corporate defense designed to dilute a hostile acquirer's stake. Allen was undeterred.
"When I decide to buy the whole company, I will buy the whole company, I do plan on controlling Starz. I'm going to do whatever I need to do to control Starz. They may resist. If they resist, that may force me to buy the whole d*** thing."
That kind of boardroom confrontation is not unusual in media M&A, where corporate boards regularly reject takeover bids and force acquirers to escalate. Allen seems to welcome the fight. He wants Starz as the subscription half of his SVOD-AVOD combination, the left hook to pair with the right.
Allen has chased bigger game before. He said he approached Shari Redstone about buying Paramount, claiming he had lined up a private equity firm managing over $100 billion, a second firm willing to buy all of Paramount's real estate and lease it back for $4 billion, and a streamer prepared to purchase everything in Paramount's vault for $10 billion. Redstone, Allen said, did not want to engage with him. He acknowledged it was her prerogative.
He also pursued ABC. Allen said Bob Iger initially told him he was open to selling, then changed his mind. Allen claimed to have a text from Iger saying a "book" would be ready after Labor Day and that Allen would be among the first to see it. Then Iger reversed course. Allen said he had already raised the money, "I literally raised that money in one day", but the deal evaporated.
Bloomberg estimated Allen's net worth at $735 million as of 2024. That is a large sum by any normal measure but modest by the standards of the deals he pursues. Allen bridges the gap with leverage, partners, and speed. His portfolio already includes The Weather Channel, purchased for $300 million in 2018, along with TheGrio, HBCU Go, Cars.TV, Pets.TV, and a string of network affiliates. The broader pattern of aggressive media consolidation suggests Allen is operating in an environment where scale is survival.
On May 22, Allen's syndicated comedy show Comics Unleashed will slide into Stephen Colbert's old time slot on CBS after The Late Show wraps its 33-year run. It is a one-season, time-buy deal, meaning Allen is paying CBS for the airtime rather than the network paying him.
Allen pitched it as a savings play for the network. He said networks waste enormous sums competing in late night, chasing an audience that by 1:30 a.m. is mostly watching infomercials. His pitch to CBS, as he described it: let him place Comics Unleashed in the slot and save the network $30 million to $40 million. The show has been in syndication for 20 years with over 300 episodes produced.
Allen said Colbert wrote him a note referencing Allen's distinction as the youngest comedian to perform on The Tonight Show, at age 18. The two had been texting. Whatever their personal rapport, the business logic is straightforward: Allen fills dead airtime with a proven product and keeps his brand on a major network.
Several questions remain unanswered. The exact percentage of Allen's BuzzFeed stake beyond the reported 52 percent, the precise legal structure of the deferred $100 million payment, and the timeline for any Starz takeover attempt are all unresolved. Starz's poison pill adds a layer of complexity that could drag out any acquisition for months or years.
Allen's layoffs and station sales suggest a company that stretched itself during a buying spree and is now trimming to fund the next round of acquisitions. Whether the free-streaming bet pays off depends on whether BuzzFeed and HuffPost can generate enough traffic and ad revenue to justify the purchase price, a question that Jonah Peretti's team could not answer when BuzzFeed was valued forty times higher.
Byron Allen built his empire by hearing "no" 50,000 times and finding 150 people willing to say "yes." The media establishment may not like his methods. But the man keeps showing up with cash, and empty chairs keep appearing at the table.