Buzzfeed UK made a loss of £9.4m in 2018, new full-year accounts show, with turnover having fallen by nearly £12m on the year before.
The group, which covers Buzzfeed’s operations in Germany, Brazil, Japan, Mexico and India, as well as the UK, reported turnover of £21.5m last year.
In 2017 it made a loss of £2.3m on turnover of £33.4m.
Turnover from the UK alone topped £6.6m in 2018, falling from £26.5m the year before, while revenue from the rest of the world, not including Europe, more than doubled to £14.2m.
Buzzfeed UK’s accounts, spanning the year to the end of December 2018, were published over Christmas but were already three months overdue.
The 2018 results are said to be in line with directors’ expectations, with the group “in its early growth phase” and continuing to invest in a number of overseas subsidiaries.
Buzzfeed was founded in the US in 2006 and launched in the UK in 2012. It closed its websites in France in December 2018 and in Spain earlier this year. The group continues to employ 164 editorial staff.
The directors say they have “received assurances of the continued support” of the group’s US parent company, Buzzfeed Inc, for at least a futher 12 months.
According to the accounts filed with Companies House, Buzzfeed UK was given further editorial and commercial independence from its US parent company in 2018 which resulted in the amount it earned from so-called “intercompany revenue” falling from £17.6m in 2017 to £2.8m in 2018.
In January 2018 Buzzfeed UK experienced an exodus of journalists following editorial redundancies – including a third of newsroom staff – which fell in late 2017.
Earlier this year Buzzfeed UK named Stuart Millar as its new editor following the departure of Janine Gibson who is now at the Financial Times.
Picture: Reuters/Brendan McDermid
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