On this episode of The Community Exchange Podcast, we welcome Ken Blom, Chief Business Officer at BuzzFeed. In our discussion, MSG and Ken discuss:
- Ken’s career path from search and agency work to joining BuzzFeed in its early social-first days
- Lessons from scaling BuzzFeed through the rise of Facebook distribution, Tasty, and branded content
- The challenges of platform dependency and what publishers can learn from the “Facebook era”
- How affiliate and commerce revenue models evolved into major drivers for digital media
- The disruptive impact of AI, LLMs, and “Google Zero” on traffic, discovery, and publisher economics
- Why attribution, data access, and payment marketplaces will define publisher–AI relationships
- The role of community, creators, and brand-owned platforms in building sustainable engagement
- What the next generation of publishing innovation may look like, from apps to the “agentic web”
And more.
