For Tasty, it’s building the next generation of food creators. With more than 300 million cross-platform followers, three times the size of the next closest competitor, Tasty continues to lead the way. In 2023, Tasty drove impressive growth in viewership of its short-form, creator-led content, up 25% year-over-year to reach 5 billion views across platforms. Tasty has translated this momentum into new opportunities for brands to partner with us, including sponsorships of creator video series, brand integrations with creator recipe content and advertiser-sponsored experiences to connect creators and food lovers in real life. For First We Feast, it is expanding the Hot Ones universe and building more IP at the intersection of food and pop culture.
With over 30 billion minutes watched to date, Hot Ones continues to attract premium episode sponsorships with household names like Sprite, Zelle and Snickers. The franchise has continue to build on its cultural relevance and serve the insatiable demand of its fans with spin-off series like Heat Eaters and new CPG launches like Hot Ones Hot Pockets. Before I wrap up, I want to reiterate my excitement for the future. We have taken steps to stabilize our business. We have organized around our most profitable business lines, and we are excited to continue building on this stronger foundation by innovating to create the future of media. More specifically, we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us to build the defining media company for the AI era.
We have only begun to see the power of AI and transforming the way we live, the way we work, the way we interact. The Internet will be a vastly different place in a few years. AI will emerge as an entirely new medium. Creativity will flourish. And I believe BuzzFeed, Inc. is at the forefront of that change. We are already harnessing the capabilities of AI to be more creative and more efficient. And while today, it is primarily a tool to adapt our existing businesses, I foresee entirely new businesses and revenue opportunities emerging as new technology evolves, and we continue to learn from our own experimentation with AI. I’m excited to work alongside you, our employees, creators, partners and shareholders to realize this vision, and I look forward to sharing more in our annual letter to shareholders next month.
I’ll now hand the call over to Matt to discuss our financial performance and outlook.
Matt Omer: Thank you, Jonah. I want to echo Jonah’s remarks regarding the strength of our go-forward business. With the sale of Complex behind us and our restructuring program nearly fully executed, we believe we are a stronger, more stable and more profitable business. We now have less exposure to declining lower-margin branded video revenues. We have meaningfully reduced our go-forward head count and cash cost structure. And as a result of paying down a significant portion of our debt, we have also reduced our go-forward cash interest obligations. And while we still have work to do to address the traffic and revenue headwinds facing our business and digital publishers at large, I believe we are significantly better positioned than our peers to navigate the way forward sustainably and profitably.
Moving on to our fourth quarter results. As a reminder, all financials and comparables presented here are on a continuing operations basis, which excludes Complex. Overall revenues for Q4 2023 declined 26% year-over-year to $75.7 million, in line with the revised outlook we provided last month. Performance by revenue line was as follows. Advertising revenues declined 25% year-over-year to $31.9 million, predominantly driven by lower year-over-year direct sold revenues. Our direct sales channel has been more acutely impacted by current trends in the advertising market. Bundling our brands into a single portfolio proved challenging during a time in which many of our clients face uncertainty with respect to their own budgets and spending. Now by contrast, trends in our programmatic advertising, which makes up the significant majority of our advertising revenues, saw a more moderate decline of 11% year-over-year in Q4.
This was entirely driven by declines on third-party platforms, which offset growth in programmatic revenues on our owned and operated properties. The advertising revenues are driven in large part by audience time spent with our content across platforms. In conjunction with advertising revenues, we continue to report US time spent across our owned and operated properties and third-party platforms according to Comscore. In Q4, US time spent as reported by Comscore declined 12% year-over-year to 72 million hours, driven primarily by ongoing declines in referral traffic from third-party platforms. However, we once again outpaced peer digital media companies in our competitive set. Content revenues declined 34% year-over-year to $27 million, driven primarily by a decline in the number of branded content advertisers.
Amid a tighter digital ad market, we have continued to experience lower demand for our custom-branded content products, which are typically focused on top of funnel, ad spend aimed at driving overall brand awareness. The Q4 branded content net revenue retention was lower year-over-year, driven by the trends I just described. Commerce and other revenues of $16.7 million declined $1.4 million or 8% year-over-year. Nearly all of our commerce revenues are generated from commissions earned on transactions initiated from our editorial shopping content. We delivered fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA of $15.1 million, also in line with our February outlook. It is important to note that per US GAAP, we have not allocated any of the shared expenses to discontinued operations.
As a result, our fourth quarter and full year 2023 adjusted EBITDA includes Complex’s portion of shared corporate expenses, which are significant. However, as Jonah discussed earlier, as a result of the sale of Complex, the underlying profitability of our ongoing operations has already improved meaningfully. In 2023, the gross margin on revenues from continuing operations, across BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Tasty and First We Feast were approximately 44% as compared to a 40% gross margin for the combined business when including Complex. We ended the fourth quarter with cash and cash equivalents of approximately $36 million, and in February, we closed the sale of Complex in an all-cash deal for approximately $114 million, including additional cash considerations.
