Byron Allen on His Fire-Sale BuzzFeed Deal and Taking Over Colbert’s CBS Time Slot

With two recent deals, Byron Allen has elevated his profile in both late-night TV and the digital media space. He’s about to take control of struggling media company BuzzFeed, and next week he is getting the the CBS time slot that is being vacated this month by “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” after the network canceled it.

Allen, a former stand-up comedian whose Allen Media Group owns 13 local TV stations, The Weather Channel and other media properties, earlier this week announced a deal to acquire a 52% controlling stake in BuzzFeed. He’s paying $20 million in cash up front, plus $100 million in a promissory note due in five years.

When 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 languished in red ink and struggled with debt commitments. In short, it’s well past its peak viral-content era a decade ago.

How is Allen going to turn things around at BuzzFeed? “I’ve done much harder things. They don’t have problems that are that big,” he said. “The money is the easy part. The strategy is to really grow this.”

Here’s the plan, according to Allen: He’s going to bring BuzzFeed and HuffPost “to your living room” — by extending their brands into what he claims will become a “premier global free streaming service,” incorporating professionally produced content and user-generated videos.

“We can put them in the streaming business,” he said.

To do that, Allen said he’s going to leverage the Weather Channel’s Local Now streaming service, which he said provides “super-hyper-localization down to your Zip Code” to provide news, weather, sports and traffic content. Local Now ingests about 5,000 pieces of video per day. Local Now, which also provides free, ad-supported TV shows and movies, is a “best-in-class streamer,” according to Allen.

BuzzFeed and HuffPost are globally recognized brands and “have enormous traffic,” he said. But they aren’t positioned as streaming-video brands. To hear Allen tell it, Local Now’s aggregated content and localized platform plus original programming from BuzzFeed and HuffPost will be a powerful combination. “We can immediately help them bring in ad dollars,” he said. “Free streaming is the fastest-growing thing. The ad dollars are moving rapidly from cable to streaming… The two best words in the world are ‘free’ and ‘streaming.’”

The new streaming platform also will be home to user-generated content, and Allen said the company will pay a revenue share with creators who want to host their content there. “We are chasing YouTube,” he said “They are the ultimate streamer. That same content sitting at YouTube can also be distributed with us.”

With BuzzFeed, Allen was jumping on a fire-sale opportunity in the hopes of turning it into something bigger.

“It was definitely a distressed sale — without a doubt,” 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 lying on its back, you can’t fall off the floor. The mistake some people make is, they buy companies in the penthouse then it starts going down a couple floors.”

Prior to Allen’s deal to take over BuzzFeed, the company had told investors on March 12, “There is substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” As of the end of Q1, BuzzFeed had about $30 million in current debt. For full-year 2025, the company posted a net loss of $57.3 million (vs. a net loss of $34 million in 2024) as revenue declined 2% to $185.3 million. BuzzFeed was once valued at $1.7 billion.

Allen said he called Peretti after BuzzFeed issued its “going concern” warning. “I had lunch with Jonah. I real like him. I said, ‘Look, let’s do it, let’s get it done.’” The plan is for BuzzFeed’s Tasty food brand and BuzzFeed Studios to spin off into a separate entity, separate from the BuzzFeed and HuffPost businesses that Allen will control.

Allen is looking at other media deals: In March, his investment arm acquired a 10.7% stake in Starz Entertainment for $25 million in a private transaction with Liberty Steve Mnuchin’s Liberty 77 Capital. Shortly afterward, Starz adopted a “poison pill” shareholder-rights plan — designed to fend off a hostile takeover by making such a deal more costly. Under that plan, if any investor acquires more than 17.5% of Starz shares, other investors will be able to buy shares at a 50% discount (thus diluting the ownership interest of the prospective takeover player).

Starz would represent a subscription-streaming video piece of Allen’s media holdings, alongside the free, ad-supported streaming businesses.

Won’t Starz’s poison pill make any attempt to buy it prohibitively expensive? Allen claimed it won’t deter him from his goal of eventually taking over the company. “The poison pill, that was a stupid move. They didn’t need to do that… When I decide to buy them, I will do a lot more than what they’re doing now – I can make Starz infinitely bigger.”

He’s previously made big-media overtures that have not panned out. Allen in 2024 had floated a $30 billion bid for Paramount Global (in partnership with unnamed financial backers), before David Ellison’s Skydance Media won the deal. In late 2023, he offered Paramount Global $3.5 billion for BET.

Meanwhile, Allen has leased a two-hour nightly comedy block on CBS. After “Late Night” ends (the final show will be May 21), two episodes of Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” will air in that time slot back-to-back. Allen will continue to lease the 12:37 a.m. hour, which will run his comedy game show “Funny You Should Ask.” Allen’s deal with CBS for the late-night airtime runs through the 2026-27 TV season, and his company is handling all ad sales for the programs. (He declined to say how much he’s paying CBS.)

Allen called CBS’s decision to cancel Colbert’s show “an unfortunate event.”

“I really like Stephen Colbert. I think he is a magnificent human being,” Allen said. “He’s a super talent, I believe he is an American treasure.”

But the cancellation of “Late Night” was another opportunity for Allen, who pointed out to CBS execs that not only would they not have to pay to produce a new late-night show if they did the “Comics Unleashed” deal with him, Allen’s company would pay millions of dollars to the network.

Allen, who has hosted more than 300 episodes of “Comics Unleashed” with more than 1,000 comedians, believes the show will be able to hold its own in terms of attracting an audience on CBS in the 11:35 p.m. window. “We’re doing a show with nothing political, racist, sexist or homophobic… just clean comedy,” he said.

Allen is taking over Colbert’s late-night slot on May 22. He said he insisted on that date, because “my hero Johnny Carson” signed off from “The Tonight Show” exactly 34 years earlier: on May 22, 1992. In the first episode airing that night, Allen said he will “take a minute to share some thoughts about late night and what we’re doing.”

Even as he becomes 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 will run both companies as chief executive, Allen noted that Peretti will remain at BuzzFeed and that the company has a strong bench of managers. He also said that he has owned the Weather Channel since 2018 — and that he’s visited its offices in Atlanta fewer than eight times since then.

“I hire the best, I pay the best, and I say, ‘Play your position,’” he said.