Not that BuzzFeed was terribly profitable. It lost money for most of its early years, only began to turn a profit in 2013, and never exceeded $10 million (while hardly a fair comparison, Apple's iTunes store alone, also in the content business, and not considered highly profitable, has been estimated to clear $1 billion in profit per year). Its fortunes reflected the still-low price of digital ads; BuzzFeed's annual ad revenues of roughly $100 million were still far less than, say, People magazine (about $1 billion).

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 1073