Why is Vice In The News Again…Making It, Not Reporting It? And What Might be the Cautionary Tale?

From HERO to ZERO…

A company with a $5 billion+ valuation only 6 years ago goes bust and agrees to sell most of its assets, to a group of creditors, for $225 million.?

Think of it as a powerful proof point of unmitigated DIGIBABBLE because the company in question is VICE Media.?

And, so once again, Vice is in the news again…making it, not reporting it.

The analysts at Robinhood reported:

“Refresher: Vice launched in the mid-'90s and quickly gained fame thanks to its edgy headlines and quirky docu-series (see: “Snakeman”). But Vice has struggled to turn a profit as news-consumption habits shift.

• Old series:?Vice's monthly US visitors dropped to 20M in March — just half its audience in 2019. Last week it axed 100 jobs and its flagship “Vice News Tonight” program.
• New chapter:?The company says it plans to use the creditors’ cash to keep biz running as usual, while looking for a larger buyout offer to help escape its $800M+ of debt.

The digi-darling downfall…?Vice’s bankruptcy follows the unraveling of other digital-native media sites that’ve struggled to keep eyeballs. Last month?BuzzFeed?closed its news division, and its stock has plunged 90% since its SPAC IPO in 2021. And last week?Paramount?shuttered MTV News after 36 years on the air. In 2017?Mashable?sold for a fifth of its 2016 valuation.

What is going on? It's not the Ad Model, per se; it's the lack of enough traffic to make the Ad Model work—although it was never really clear that it ever really did…a topic for another time.

The INSIGHT, according to Robinhood, might be a wake-up call for all digital media:

“News go-tos are consolidating views…?Half of US adults are getting some or most of their news from social media, redirecting precious ad dollars away from digital publishers. While buzzy headlines from Vice and BuzzFeed can rack up likes on social feeds, it doesn’t translate to consistent site traffic. Meanwhile, traditional publishers are holding their weight:?The New York Times?added 1M digital-only subscribers last year, in its second-best year for online subs.”

WAIT!!!! Did I read that correctly??????

The New York Times, “The Old Grey Lady,” added 1M digital-only subscribers…fee payers…revenue generators—you get the point.?

So much to unpack….

Let me begin with VICE MEDIA. I was lucky enough to have spent a lot of quality time with the founder and his team early on, as the company I worked for, at the time, WPP had invested in them.

What eye-opening learning and fun that was. They were outrageous, smart, and creative. Remember, they began as a printed magazine for stoners (basically). Then, they pivoted into an online “must invest or be left-behind” juggernaut as they claimed to be the only way to reach that ever-elusive target of 18-25 males (stoners).

Interestingly enough, when we did a traffic analysis of their site, it seemed to skew older and less stoner, but that hurt the story—even though others might have found that an even more compelling argument for real growth…but not investors.?

Yet, they managed to lean into that too, when it made sense. I call your attention to some promotional work they did with Intel, for example, back in the day, which was exciting and decidedly not stoner. We helped them pitch great engagement work of that sort as well.?

They also knew how to leverage their content and general gestalt, which calls to mind a campaign we did with them for Schweppes, all about mixing, in Australia, that was brilliant.

Creating and expanding content categories was a focus until they got nailed for taking their stoner image way too seriously…their valuation, if not their business, continued to balloon.?

And now? Bankruptcy.

I was always a fan. I wrote about them a number of times, the first in November of 2015, right after they signed a deal with A&E.

In a LinkedIn post called, Disney On Vice, I wrote:?

“A&E announced that Vice Media will take over their H2 channel, filling it with the content that has made them so attractive to advertisers who are eager to reach the young men who have made Vice a habit.

Interestingly, Disney is a co-owner of A&E. And recent news articles about Disney’s interest and investment in Vice have primed the pump for today’s announcement.

But while Disney and Vice may seem an odd couple — Disney, the king of all things princess, hooking up with the bad boys of content — the truth is that Disney has always understood the value of great stories…epic tales populated by a full spread of archetypes. (By the way, there has always been a?dark side to Disney.)

However, what I find most newsworthy, is that, amid all the hue and cry from the Digibabblists about the death of television, Shane Smith, arguably one of the most disruptive media players in the business, is going for television with great and unabashed gusto.

Separate from the A&E development, Smith’s Emmy award-winning documentary series on HBO has led to a new deal to do a weekly news show, which two weeks ago signed?Bloomberg’s Josh Tyraniel to lead the charge. And as that unfolds, so too will the online destinations — mark my words, the cross-platform feed will be exponential.

Smith gets it — it’s all about delivering great content and making it easy to see, which means broad distribution, like the access to 78 million “hard-wired” households in the U.S. (and soon to come, at least a dozen channels in Europe) all of which gives people the opportunity to follow that content across media.”

It was a cross-platform deal. In its broadest sense, TV and then movies played a key role. Vice wasn’t dependent upon one delivery system or limited by anything other than what it could actually deliver in the way of great content, which led to my ending:

“Here’s what Shane Smith has to say about the real opportunity ahead of all of us: ‘I never thought we had a chance of impacting anything. I am just starting to realize that we can change things — not just Vice, but all of us. In fact, we have to.’

Change is the operative word. We can change things, but not if we trade one set of limiting prejudices for another.

That’s why I find this story so compelling. Here is Vice, so championed for its relevance and social currency (not to mention, for all things hip and trendy) standing up for a medium that’s well into its 60s and defining it in the broadest terms possible.

In my book, that is truly revolutionary not derivative faux.”

Then in 2017, I wrote about a local digital news site, The Gothamist, that went under (no doubt many are snickering now). The reason, even back then, was the digital ad model. It wasn’t sustainable when traffic was low; frankly, traffic was low because their content wasn’t that interesting.?

Having said that Vice was still trending up, and I called out the further expansion of their publishing thinking and deeper understanding and insight into their audience as they again broke ground:?

“..to that end,?Vice?just launched their second annual music issue online?and offline:

“We wanted the Music Issue to feel diverse in the artists, genres, and stories we featured. We wanted to give a platform to up-and-coming artists, and we wanted to discuss how advancements in technology are changing the way we consume and think about music. But flipping through the completed issue, we have a surprising amount of archival content, too, all handled with a sense of preciousness and admiration, the kind reserved for anything that evokes strong feelings of nostalgia. These pieces feel like odes to simpler times, and perhaps focusing on them was a subconscious way of dealing with a future that feels especially tumultuous.”

You see? They are not self-conscious in terms of being held back by Digibabble constraints…their deals with Disney and HBO should have made that clear. Rather, they get to their audience, delivering not self-importance, but relevance and excellence be it broadcast, cable, streaming, or even print.

And there you have it.

Readers want to be enchanted. They need writers who can create that enchantment, and publishers who can deliver it. We need more enchantment and less entitlement.

Simple equation … online and off.

There you have it. Vice had it...once, and now the DIGIBABBLE crowd is convinced that the issue is digital in nature…and that they were a digital-only publisher.

But remember the Robinhood report, "Half of US adults are getting some or most of their news from social media, redirecting precious ad dollars away from digital publishers."

But what about the other half, and how do we tap into that? The New York Times figured it out…

KNEE JERK ALERT. This isn't about your liking or disliking the Times or any specific publication…PLEASE!?

Get content that talks to your audience—well written, produced, designed, shot, recorded, whatever. Available in the format I like when I want is what I will pay for and go to. The rest? Happy to read a cute list from time to time and see what the stars of some 80s sitcoms look like today…but that ain't the news source of my prime reading.?

I, for one, hope VICE MEDIA can find its way back. But it's not as yet another digital-only shock/gonzo content source. If they can’t remember where they were and what they could have done…lose the DIGIBABBLE and deliver meaningful, relevant content with a real POV…to people who care…they have a shot.?

As for the rest, going…going…gone! And the joke will be that the traditional, credible (depending upon your view, obviously), so-called old-fashioned dead-media sources will continue to hold their own…with the paying 50%.

What's your view?