Six months ago, we were report­ing on Buzzfeed’s record-break­ing prof­its, as the native advertising/viral content/news site con­tin­ued relent­less­ly on its seem­ing­ly unstop­pable upward tra­jec­to­ry. Accord­ing to Ven­ture­Beat, rumor has it that it’s now con­sid­er­ing a fifth fund­ing round which just might be as high as $200 mil­lion. You don’t need to be a vet­er­an busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er to appre­ci­ate that when your com­pa­ny inspires that kind of con­fi­dence amongst investors, it’s turned into pure gold.

A lit­tle turbulence

The New York startup’s last fund­ing round was back in Jan­u­ary 2013, when it raised a com­par­a­tive­ly mod­est $20 mil­lion, bring­ing its total invest­ment at the time to $46.3 mil­lion. But savvy busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers who’ve been fol­low­ing its recent progress care­ful­ly will know that it’s maybe over­sim­pli­fy­ing things to describe Buzzfeed’s progress sim­ply in terms of plain sailing.

Things were look­ing fab­u­lous back in Novem­ber last year, when its for­ays into long-form jour­nal­ism and its list posts reached an audi­ence of over 130 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors. Fast-for­ward to this month, though, and it’s clear that the start­up has tak­en a cou­ple of hefty horse kicks recent­ly. For one thing, when it stopped pro­duc­ing so many inter­ac­tive quizzes – one of its most pop­u­lar social media offer­ings – its Face­book traf­fic tanked, plum­met­ing from 13 mil­lion shares in April to 5.9 mil­lion in May (a 55 per­cent fall on its total for March). At about the same time, its long-stand­ing Pres­i­dent and Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer, Jon Stein­berg, announced he was step­ping down to join British news and enter­tain­ment site, The Dai­ly Mail.

What’s next for Buzzfeed?

That said, many com­pa­nies in Adland sur­vive occa­sion­al quakes like this – peo­ple move on and some strate­gies don’t work very well, nei­ther of which are irrecov­er­able set­backs. Buz­zfeed has oth­er­wise been mov­ing very much in the right direc­tion. In March this year, CEO Jon­ah Peretti announced inter­na­tion­al expan­sion plans, drop­ping the names Tokyo, Mum­bai and Mex­i­co City in his blog post for Medium.com.

As for the rumored $200 mil­lion fund­ing round, it’s not clear at this stage how advanced the talks have become; a Buz­zfeed spokesman would only say, “We don’t com­ment on rumors and speculation.”

As the per­spic­u­ous busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er will note, this might not amount to a con­fir­ma­tion, but nei­ther is it a denial.

Watch this space.