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The Inside Story of How Disney’s Attempt to Buy BuzzFeed Fell Apart | Vanity Fair

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In an excerpt from his new book, ‘Traffic,’ former BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith reports how Jonah Peretti enraged Bob Iger by turning down a half-billion-dollar offer a decade back—and kept riding the digital media wave until it crashed.

Save this story Save this story By the end of 2013, BuzzFeed was having it all. Our traffic hit 130 million unique visitors a month, riding Facebook’s relentless growth. Some of our competitors had begun to imitate everything we did, which mostly amounted to making lists. Others promised to do the same thing we were, but without the embarrassing memes. In Silicon Valley, an ambitious former Goldman Sachs banker named Carlos Watson persuaded an old friend, Laurene Powell Jobs , to finance a website called Ozy that would aim to be a smarter, slicker, more socially conscious BuzzFeed. And in that

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