There are signs of stress at BuzzMedia.
The company bills itself as one of the top 40 websites in the country in terms of traffic, but it seems to have a hard time getting most of its visitors to stay on its site for more than 90 seconds.
If that weren’t enough to deal with, BuzzMedia has, perhaps, even a more pressing problem: its stormy relationship with National Enquirer-owner American Media Inc.
BuzzMedia until recently had been handling ad sales for AMI-owned Radaronline, but AMI claims it was never paid for BuzzMedia-sold ads.
Radaronline had 3.6 million unique visitors in December — each spending 3 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. It is the fourth-most popular site listed at BuzzMedia, which lists 49 different brands under its umbrella.
But according to AMI CEO David Pecker, “They sold the ads and they never paid me.” Pecker claims that over 18 months, BuzzMedia withheld more than $350,000 in ad revenue due AMI.
“I know the advertisers paid them,” said Pecker, who insisted he checked in with friends in the auto ad industry and that the ads ran on the Radaronline site.
Pecker has since pulled the ad rep account from BuzzMedia and hired his own three-person, in-house ad sales team and is considering legal action to collect money he claims is owed him.
BuzzMedia, of course, is the company that purchased Spin from McEvoy Media last July and promptly shut down the magazine and laid off a good part of the staff.
In its new incarnation as a digital publication, Spin’s unique visitors actually inched up to 537,000 a month in December, according to ComScore, after dropping as low as 206,000 in April.
Spin was started by Bob Guccione Jr. in 1985. When he sold it in 1997, it was profitable. But in recent years, it was losing ground to websites such as pitchfork.com and RollingStone.com
Visitors to the Spin site, however, are spending less than 2 minutes there — 1 minute, 48 seconds, on average, to be precise, according to comScore numbers reviewed by Media Ink.
“It’s a zombie website,” claimed one media exec familiar with the comScore results. He suspects many of the visitors are getting directed to the site from other websites and promptly log out once they get there.
All Things D reported late last year that there were rumors that BuzzMedia, which is said to have raised more than $31 million from venture-capital heavyweights like Redpoint, Anthem Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates, missed its sales target in 2012. Its revenues were said to be around $50 million.
Tyler Goldman, who was BuzzMedia CEO for six of its seven years, was booted upstairs to executive chairman. Steve Hansen, who joined in mid-2012 as president and chief operating officer, will be the new CEO.
Just under 70 percent of BuzzMedia’s traffic comes from three sites — Fanpop.com, which attracted 12 million unique visitors in December; Hark.com, which had 5.9 million uniques; and Justjared.com, with 3.9 million visitors.
BuzzMedia execs did not return calls.
Reuters man
Jim Roberts, former New York Times assistant managing editor and one of the newsroom’s digital leaders, has landed at Reuters — where he will be the executive editor,, Reuters Digital, starting Feb. 25.
In the recent round of Times buyouts, insiders said that only about 20 people stepped forward — short of the 30 newsroom managers that Executive Editor Jill Abramson said she needed to avoid layoffs. But only about three people overall eventually ended up getting pink-slipped.
The rank-and-file reporters probably saved some of their bosses from the chopping block. The Newspaper Guild had 14 volunteers within its ranks step forward and take a package. That number was larger than expected, since Guild-covered employees had just completed a bitterly fought negotiation over a new contract and were not facing imminent layoffs.
Niche news
There is another Fashion Week editorial shake-up, this time at the upscale Niche Media.
Samantha Yanks, who had been editor-in-chief of Gotham, is getting bumped up to executive fashion editor for the entire portfolio of magazines at Niche — Miami’s Ocean Drive, Los Angeles Confidential and Hamptons Magazine, among others.
Catherine Sabino, who had been No. 3 on the masthead, takes over as editor of Gotham.
Laurie Brookins, who had been doing the fashion editing for the chain — and accumulating 40,000 Twitter followers in the process — is now cut loose as the fashion editor-at-large and will be editing several of the company’s custom publishing titles.
According to President and CEO Katherine Nicholls, “Laurie will also be pursuing some of her own projects that she is very passionate about.”