BuzzFeed Stock Drops About 40%, Analyst Cites Lockup Agreements

• Buzzfeed’s stock dropped about 40% on Monday.
• It’s now worth about $300 million, per Yahoo Finance, far below its June IPO price of $1.5 billion.
• One analyst said lockup agreements expired and the company has many “non-traditional” investors.

BuzzFeed’s stock dropped about 40% on Monday, putting its

market cap

below what AOL paid for HuffPost in 2011. 

The media company’s market capitalization is at about $300 million, per Yahoo Finance. In 2011, AOL bought HuffPost for $315 million, according to the New York Times. BuzzFeed later bought HuffPost from Verizon.

In early December, Buzzfeed went public via a SPAC merger. Its life post-IPO has been rocky; in its first earnings call as a public company, it cut its workforce, called for buyouts in its news division, and lost three top editors.

One analyst who watches the company and asked to be unnamed because of the sensitivity of the issue, told Insider the reason is relatively straightforward: lockup agreements for many of Buzzfeed’s shareholders who bought stock in the company before it went public via SPAC in December expired early this June. 

What makes BuzzFeed’s situation “unique,” the analyst added, is that the media company has a “heavy concentration” of what they called “non-traditional” investors, such as publishing companies. 

“This was the first and biggest lockup to expire,” the analyst added. 

A BuzzFeed spokesperson confirmed the fluctuation was related to the expiration of the lockup period