The digital media company is very comfortable, it told the Financial Times, despite a report that internal financial targets were missed by over $80m

BuzzFeed missed internal financial targets in 2015 and had to substantially cut its projected revenue by about half according to a report published by the Financial Times on Tuesday.

According to the FT, the company has been forced to cut its 2016 revenue target from $500m to $250m after missing its 2015 target by more than $80m. The company reportedly projected revenues of $250m in 2015 but generated less than $170m.

A spokeswoman for BuzzFeed did not immediately return a request for comment. We are very comfortable with where the digital content world is going and think we are well-positioned, a representative told the Financial Times in an unattributed statement. The company did not provide other figures.

The news comes in the midst of costs cuts across the media sector, at organizations including Mashable, the International Business Times, Al Jazeera America and the Guardian.

Buzzfeed, founded by Jonah Peretti, has grown by leaps and bounds since its expansion into hard news and a greater emphasis on video content began in 2011. Last year, it received a cash infusion from NBCUniversal of some $200m. The stake increased BuzzFeeds valuation to $1.5bn.

Though there has been speculation about an eventual share sale for years, BuzzFeed has remained in private hands. But its protection from the vicissitudes of the market is diminishing: some of its backers are themselves publicly traded, notably NBCU and Japanese telecoms giant Softbank. The NBCU stake seemed to herald a move by old media into the harder-to-monetize digital world; the New York-based television and movie giant also bought a stake in Vox Media, another venture-backed news organization, for another $200m.

Indeed, there is significant old-media ownership in BuzzFeed: Hearst Ventures, an investment arm of newspaper, magazine and TV owner Hearst, led BuzzFeeds first investment round in 2008 and contributed to its series B and C rounds, as well.

The startups approach to the news has created controversy some staffers have been accused of lifting stories without attribution, and the outlet ran afoul of advertising laws in the UK in January when regulators said an advertorial was improperly labeled.

But BuzzFeed has also found a large audience for high-quality reporting among digital readers who famously refuse to pay directly for news and remain openly hostile to online advertising. It has broken major stories, among them a conflict of interest at the NSA that resulted in the ousting of Teresa Shea, director of the agencys signals intelligence directorate. Last month, Aram Roston and Jeremy Singer-Vine won a Scripps-Howard investigative reporting award.

Read more: www.theguardian.com