BuzzFeed buys e-commerce startup Scroll; founder Ben Kaufman now leads BuzzFeed Product Lab, which is turning its NY office into a physical store to test ideas
Two years ago, Ben Kaufman, then-CEO of well-funded consumer product startup Quirky, delivered one of the most awkward, and candid …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after Facebook began testing shops inside Pages, keeping discovery through checkout on-platform, BuzzFeed answered by buying its way into commerce rather than renting shelf space from a social network. The hire matters as much as the deal: Ben Kaufman ran Quirky, a heavily funded consumer-products startup whose very public struggles he had already addressed candidly, so BuzzFeed is getting battle-tested product-development experience.
The bet compounded. As a later deep dive into BuzzFeed's ecommerce expansion recounts, this acquisition seeded both a dedicated Commerce division and the Product Lab, which went on to partner with Walmart — making this 2016 deal the origin point of the revenue stream BuzzFeed would later lean on.
First-order effects
- BuzzFeed installs Kaufman atop a new Product Lab and converts its New York office into a physical store, letting it test real products against its own audience before committing to inventory or licensing deals.
- Scroll's team folds into BuzzFeed, giving the publisher in-house e-commerce capability it previously lacked while Kaufman attempts a second act after Quirky's collapse.
Second-order effects
- With platforms like Facebook capturing the full shopping journey inside their own apps, BuzzFeed's owned storefront-and-lab model hedges against referral traffic losing its commercial value.
- The lab-to-commerce pipeline creates inventory for retail partners — the groundwork for the Walmart partnership that followed — turning BuzzFeed's audience into a distribution channel brands pay to reach.
Third-order effects
- Commerce became a pillar of the diversification story BuzzFeed told when it went public via a $1.5B SPAC merger — but the later fire-sale of Complex to Ntwrk shows how unevenly these side bets held value relative to the core media business.
- If the pattern holds, publishers structurally split into those owning their commerce stack and those dependent on platform marketplaces, with physical test spaces like the NY store as an unusual but durable R&D edge.
The trend: Media companies are building first-party commerce operations to offset advertising dependence, and BuzzFeed's Product Lab under Ben Kaufman is an early template for that shift.