“Our model evolved,” Mr. Peretti said.

An emphasis on native advertising — listicles and such sponsored by brands — eroded once Facebook opened its channels to companies, allowing them to post marketing messages on the site.

“We had to shift, and our team was able to adjust,” Mr. Peretti said.

BuzzFeed now has a growing commerce business that includes branded cookware at Walmart and an affiliate division that brings in money any time a reader buys something from an online store when coming from a link in a BuzzFeed article. Last year, those two businesses drove nearly $68 million in revenue, almost double that of the previous year, the people with knowledge of the company said.

Mr. Peretti thinks that model can be expanded. Readers who come across a story about a particular hotel, for example, might end up booking a stay there. BuzzFeed wants a commission for that transaction. He also has plans to create subscription revenue from events, what he calls “paid social.”

Now that he has matured as an executive, Mr. Peretti, who in BuzzFeed’s early days seemed driven by a mad scientist’s interest in sussing out what people like to share online, has gotten more interested in translating his knowledge of digital culture into dollars.

At a company of roughly 1,100 people, the news division employs 200 journalists and costs about $18 million a year, according to two executives with knowledge of the company’s finances. Mr. Smith, who oversaw the layoff of dozens of journalists during what he described as “a tough week” in January last year, was given a mandate to find new ways to subsidize the newsroom, only to express frustration that BuzzFeed’s sales team rarely, if ever, sold ads against news articles, these people said. BuzzFeed News was eventually allotted two salespeople of its own.

“I’ve been really pleased over the last year to see BuzzFeed investing in the business side of news,” Mr. Smith said in an interview.