Two recent deals have made Byron Allen a household name in both late-night television and the digital media space. He is trying to take control of the struggling media company BuzzFeed, and next week he will take over the time slot vacated this month by the cancellation of CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Allen, a former stand-up comedian whose Allen Media Group owns 13 local television stations, the Weather Channel and other media assets, announced a deal earlier this week to acquire a 52% controlling stake in BuzzFeed. He paid $20 million in cash upfront and another $100 million in promissory notes due in five years.
Once the deal closes, expected by the end of this month, Allen will become BuzzFeed’s chairman and CEO, replacing co-founder Jonah Peretti, who will become president of BuzzFeed AI. Since its IPO in 2021, BuzzFeed has suffered losses and a debt burden. In other words, the peak era of viral content 10 years ago is long gone.
How does Allen plan to turn things around at BuzzFeed? “I’ve done things that are harder. They don’t have as much trouble,” he said. “The money is easy. The strategy is to really grow this.”
According to Allen, the plan is as follows: He intends to bring BuzzFeed and HuffPost “into your living room” by extending their brand into “the best global free streaming service” that incorporates professionally produced content and user-generated videos.
“We can get them into the streaming business,” he said.
To that end, Allen said he plans to leverage the Weather Channel’s Local Now streaming service, which he said offers “hyper-hyper-localization down to the zip code” to deliver news, weather, sports and transportation content. Local Now ingests approximately 500,000 videos per day. Local Now also offers free ad-supported TV shows and movies and is a “best-in-class streamer,” Allen said.
BuzzFeed and HuffPost are globally recognized brands and “have a huge amount of traffic,” he said. However, they are not positioned as a streaming video brand. To hear Allen say it, Local Now’s aggregated content and localized platform, combined with BuzzFeed and HuffPost’s original programming, will be a powerful combination. “We can immediately help them get advertising dollars,” he said. “Free streaming is the fastest growing thing. Advertising dollars are rapidly moving from cable to streaming…The two greatest words in the world are ‘free’ and ‘streaming.'”
The new streaming platform will also house user-generated content, and Allen said the company will pay revenue shares to creators who want to host their content there. “We’re going after YouTube. They’re the ultimate streamers. They can also distribute the same content that’s on YouTube with us,” he said.
At BuzzFeed, Allen jumped at the opportunity to make a fire sale and tried to turn it into something bigger.
“It was definitely a distressed sale, no question,” Allen said. “They told the world they were about to run out of money!” He added, “At the end of the day, when a company is on its back, it doesn’t fall through the floor. The mistake some people make is they buy a company that’s in the penthouse and then it starts to fall a few floors down.”
Prior to Mr. Allen’s deal to acquire BuzzFeed, the company told investors on March 12 that there were “substantial questions about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” At the end of the first quarter, BuzzFeed’s current debt was approximately $30 million. For the full year 2025, sales decreased 2% to $185.3 million, and the company posted a net loss of $57.3 million (compared to a net loss of $34 million in 2024). BuzzFeed was once valued at $1.7 billion.
Allen said he called Peretti after BuzzFeed raised an alert of “continued concerns.” “I had lunch with Jonah, and I really like him. I said, ‘Here we go, let’s get this done.'” The plan is for BuzzFeed’s Tasty food brand and BuzzFeed Studios to be spun off and separate from the BuzzFeed and HuffPost businesses that Allen controls.
Allen is also considering other media deals. In March, his investment arm acquired a 10.7% stake in Starz Entertainment for $25 million in a private transaction with Steve Mnuchin’s Liberty77 Capital. Shortly thereafter, Starts adopted a “poison pill” shareholder rights plan. The purpose of this is to avoid a hostile takeover by making it more costly. Under the plan, if an investor acquires 17.5% or more of Starz stock, other investors would be able to buy the stock at a 50% discount (thus diluting the acquisition candidate’s ownership).
Starz will represent Allen’s media holdings’ subscription streaming video offerings, along with its free ad-supported streaming business.
Will he try to buy Starz’s poison pill at an exorbitant price? Mr. Allen insisted that would not interfere with his goal of ultimately taking over the company. “Poison, that was a stupid move. They didn’t have to do that…If I decide to buy them, I’m going to do much more than what they’re doing right now. I can make Stars infinitely bigger.”
He has made offers to major media outlets before, but without success. In 2024, Allen had proposed a $30 billion bid for Paramount Global (in partnership with an unnamed financial backer) before David Ellison’s Skydance Media won the deal. In late 2023, he offered Paramount Global $3.5 billion for BET.
Meanwhile, Allen is renting a two-hour comedy slot every night on CBS. After “Late Night” ends (the final show is May 21), two episodes of Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” will air back-to-back in that time slot. Mr. Allen will continue to use the 12:37 a.m. time slot to air his comedy game show, “Funny You Should Ask.” Allen’s late-night contract with CBS runs through the 2026-2027 television season, with Allen’s company handling all advertising sales for the show. (He declined to say how much he is paying CBS.)
Allen called CBS’ decision to cancel Colbert’s show “an unfortunate event.”
“I really like Stephen Colbert. I think he’s a great human being,” Allen said. “He is a tremendous talent and I believe he is an American treasure.”
But the cancellation of “Late Night” also presented a new opportunity for Allen, who pointed out to CBS executives that not only would a deal with “Comics Unleashed” eliminate the cost of producing a new late-night show, but Allen’s company would also pay the network millions of dollars.
Allen, who has hosted more than 300 episodes of “Comics Unleashed” with more than 1,000 comedians, believes the show is competitive in terms of attracting viewers in CBS’ 11:35 p.m. slot. “We do a show that doesn’t have anything political, racist, sexist or homophobic, just clean comedy,” he said.
Mr. Allen will take over Mr. Colbert’s late-night slot on May 22nd. He said he was particular about that date because “my hero Johnny Carson” left “The Tonight Show” exactly 34 years ago on May 22, 1992. In the first episode, which aired that night, Allen said, “I’m going to share a little bit of my thoughts about Late Night and what we’re doing.”
Even as CEO of BuzzFeed, Allen will remain chairman and CEO of Allen Media Group, which he founded in 1993. The company owns and operates 13 ABC, CBS and NBC network affiliate broadcast television stations in 11 U.S. markets, The Weather Channel, and properties including Pets.tv, Comedy.tv, Recipe.tv, Cars.tv, ES.tv, MyDestination.tv, JusticeCentral.tv, TheGrio and HBCU GO.
Asked how he would run both companies as chief executive, Allen said Peretti would remain at BuzzFeed and that the company has a strong team of managers. He also said he has owned the Weather Channel since 2018 and has visited the Atlanta office less than eight times since then.
“I hire the best people, I pay the best salaries, and I say, ‘Play your position,'” he said.
