 Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye. -- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: 1/ 56 comments
Eventually, Vice transitioned to a string of progressively worsening corporate owners, each more dishonest, predatory - and gullible - than the last. The company was one of the most enthusiastic marks for Facebook's infamous "pivot to video" - in which Mark Zuckerberg destroyed half the media industry by tricking them into thinking that the public was clamoring for video content, based on fraudulent viewing numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video 3/ Vice went all-in on video, spending hundreds of millions to finance Zuckerberg's doomed attempt to conquer Youtube. But unlike other the rubes who got zucked, Vice found greater fools to scam, convincing giant, slow-moving media companies that the best way to get in on the Next Big Thing was to shower them with vast sums of string-free money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viceland_(Canadian_TV_channel) 4/ And yet, at every turn, through a succession of increasingly incompetent owners who bought the stumbling, declining Vice at fire-sale prices and then proceeded to hack away at the wages and tools its journalists depended on while paying executives salaries so high that they beggared the imagination, Vice's reporters continued to turn out *stellar* material. 5/ This went on *literally* until the last moment. The memorial posted by @404mediaco rounds up a selection of major stories Vice's beleaguered, precarious writers produced even as Vice's vulture capitalist leadership were pulling the rug out from under them: https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-vices-legacy-and-the-idea-that-the-internet-is-forever/ 6/ True to form, those private equity scumbags locked all those workers out of the company's CMS without notice - and then forgot to lock down the podcasting back-end. That allowed a group of Vice veterans - Matthew Gault, Emily Lipstein, @annamerlan, Tim Marchman and Mack Lamoureux - to gather for a totally unauthorized, tell-all session that they pushed out on an official Vice channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKT4OtDEJRA 7/ It's a hell of a listen. Not only do these Vice veterans have lots of fascinating history to recount, but they also describe the conditions under which those blockbuster stories of Vice's final days were produced. As the "visionary leaders" of the company paid themselves millions, they halted payments to key suppliers, from Lexisnexis to the interview transcription service the writers depended on. Writers paid out of pocket to search PACER court records. 8/ Not only did Vice's reporters do incredible work under terrible and worsening circumstances, but the Vice writers who got out ahead of the total collapse are *also* doing incredible work. 404 Media is a writer-owned investigative news publisher founded by four Vice escapees - Samantha Cole, @jasonkoebler, @emanuelmaiberg and @josephcox, which is both producing *incredible* work *and* sustaining the writers who founded it: 9/ All of which leads to an *inescapable* conclusion: whatever problems Vice had, they didn't include "writers don't do productive work" and *also* didn't include "that work isn't economically viable*. Whatever problems Vice had, they weren't problems with Vice's workers - it was a problem with Vice's *bosses*. 10/ Which makes Vice's final, ignominious punishment at the hands of those bosses *even more* brutal, stupid and inexcusable. According to the leaked memos emanating from the company's investors and their millionaire C-suite toadies, the business's new strategy is *abandoning their website* in order to publish on *social media*. This is...I mean, this,.. This is... Wow. I mean, *wow*. 11/ Now, this wasn't always *quite* so obvious. Back when Vice was falling for Facebook's "pivot to video," it wasn't *completely* obvious that the long con was to take your audience hostage and ransom them back to you. But *deliberately* organizing your business to be reliant on social media barons *today*? It's like trusting your money to Sam Bankman-Fried...in 2024. 13/ If there was ever a moment when the obvious, catastrophic, imminent risk of trusting Big Tech intermediaries to sit between you and your customers or audience, it was now. This is *not* the moment to be "social first." This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that *you* control: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse 14/ encourage 15/ The most bonkers part of this strategy is that it's coming from private equity bosses, who laud themselves as the great strategists of the 21st century, whose claim on so much of our global capital and resources is derived from their brilliant insight, which allows them to buy "distressed assets" like Vice, "restructure" them to find "efficiencies" and sell them on. 16/ The reality is that PE goons - like other financiers - are basically herding animals. *Everyone's* hit on the tactic of buying up beloved media companies - from the 150-year-old *Popular Science* to modern publications like CNet - and then filling them with spammy garbage in the hopes that Google will fail to notice and continue to award them pride-of-place on search results pages: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task 17/ The fact that these billionaire brain-geniuses can't figure out how to "turn around" a site whose workers a) produce brilliant, popular, successful work; and b) depart to found successful firms that commercialize that work tells you everything about their ability to spot "a good business opportunity." 18/ PE - like other mafiosi - only have one business-plan, the "bust out," where you invade a business that produces useful things, force them to pay your chosen suppliers sky-high fees for things they don't need, extract massive fees for your "management" and then walk away from the collapse: https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben 19/ I'm on tour with my new novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me TONIGHT in LA with @adamconover at Vroman's, then on MONDAY in SEATTLE with Neal Stephenson (Feb 26, Third Place Books). After that, it's Portland, Phoenix, Tucson, Anaheim and more! https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour eof/  Parasites infect both healthy and unhealthy hosts. They alter their host organisms to suit the parasite. https://www.snexplores.org/article/parasitic-worms-alter-body-inflammation-immune-system-treatment In another example, vampire bats have similar strategies as hedge fund managers, of "feed & fly off". Although in the case of Chris Hohn, it's more "feed & eff off". Modern hedge fund managers are like chop shops. @pluralistic Drink!   @pluralistic I'm definitely moving in this direction. I didn't think I'd return to WP-style blogging as a format, but until I can investigate other options, it's familiar and comfortable and under my control.  So much of these acts reminds you of a protection racket. An unwanted third party inserts themselves into the existence & survival of your business, and you're providing payola to mobsters in perpetuity.  @Npars01 @pluralistic  @pluralistic 🤣🤣🤣 But yeah, it's the level of "oh no, a banana peel in front of me, I will fall again!" @pluralistic @jasonkoebler @emanuelmaiberg @josephcox I have been reading 404, and it has been excellent. I did not realize they were from vice.  @pluralistic  @pluralistic Yeah, vice dot com is one of those things that I, literally, can make neither head nor tails of on the one hand: look at the list of folks that they've published over the years, and it's just a murderer's row of the best of the best, since the internet was a thing on the other: look at the editorial/mgmt decisions they've made over the years, and... really? Really? Really!?! Really‽ @pluralistic this is spot on as always, and very kind to us. The only thing I would quibble with/add is to note that VICE was really early to video (for a news org) and made high quality documentaries that the audience loved and that were making tons of money via YouTube and were leading to sponsored, but still not shitty, documentaries. This is a model that was working. And then they decided to make a cable tv channel (????????), which *everyone* thought was dumb at the time @pluralistic when this happened, they took $500 million of VC money at insane rates, moved all resources from making scrappy docs for the internet that people loved, focused on super expensive and long long lead time things for a TV channel their audience didn’t have and that was barely on any homes in the US, and lost all of the momentum their brands had built online, where the audience was @pluralistic I started at vice maybe two years before this. Motherboard specifically went from making 4-5 30-minute, in the field documentaries that got millions of views and were beloved to hiring a bunch of people to make a TV pilot. I think they spent $2 million hiring people to make and shoot four episodes of a tv show that executives hated (but was objectively good, and would have done well on YT), that they literally threw in the trash and never aired anywhere @pluralistic they burned through all this money, put most of our video staff on TV, spent way less on documentaries for the internet, and THEN they sort of did the “pivot to video” on socials where we got money from FB, Verizon, Snapchat, etc, to “fund” the videos for YouTube. So then the “digital” operation (us) ended up publishing a bunch of weird Facebook lives and things we made for much less $$ than the documentaries people originally came to us for @pluralistic so then the digital audience, which was used to 30 minute docs about, like, whale cullings in the Faroe Islands, was being fed studio shows that were cheap to make. Everyone did the best with what we could but often the response from an audience that expected long form doc was “fuck you, what is this?” @pluralistic the TV channel made good stuff but no one could watch it, it didn’t go onto the internet in any coherent way, the internet stuff was less funded so it wasn’t as good or the good ideas were stolen for TV, they had massive investors who wanted a return on the TV network no one wanted, they took more money more debt gave up more control to TV and VC execs or people from that world and entered a death spiral. The TV network and investments associated with it fucked *everything* @pluralistic they kept throwing money at this TV problem forever. When Vox and other digital media companies started making shows for Netflix, VICE at first did not even want to do this because they “owned a tv channel” @pluralistic which brings me back to your thread and your point. We had a loyal audience and literally had a subscription magazine. We were making documentaries that were winning awards and making money at a ridiculously low cost. What if instead of launching a tv channel at the most obviously stupid time they launched their *own* streaming network? Starting with their already existing base of paying subscribers! or if they simply decided to NOT light hundreds of millions of $$ on fire?  @jasonkoebler @pluralistic This is fascinating on multiple levels. If you squint, you can kinda see a rationale that says "we're too reliant on YT for distribution," which considering the time frame is a very insightful observation. But... a cable TV channel? That's a very VC decision. Like their VC fund got a "sweet deal" on a cable channel and synergy!  @tob @jasonkoebler @pluralistic I think they honestly would have been better served by doing what companies like Collegehumor/Dropout, LTT, etc did and creating their _own_ subscription platform for their longform content. Everything VC’s touch, dies. If you work for a VC funded business, you don't work for a founder, you work for scam artist. If you work for a VC funded business, you don't have customers, you have victims. If you work for a VC funded business, you don’t have a future, you are less than 90 days from unemployment.   Vice was a MUCH bigger deal in Canada than in America for much longer but the founders were rotten to the core.  @pluralistic we need to tell this story a thousand times. Especially as Meta seems to have redeemed its reputation.  @pluralistic - the distribution rugpull wasn’t social media’s creation. Wallmart was the master of scaling suppliers until they were dependent then squeezing margins.  @pluralistic I'll always be mad at Vice for outing Naomi Wu which caused the Chinese government to force her off all social media. @pluralistic I am actually suprised that Vice lasted that long. @pluralistic Incompetence cannot explain CEOs' behaviors. In particular, it cannot explain why they are hired again and again when when their résumé is a long list of "sunk that firm, then sunk another one". If my résumé where a list of public failures, I would not be hired again. Yet these people are. @pluralistic Then, of course, everyone will notice that Vice used to be valued at 5.7 billions and that burning all that cash is proof of incompetence. I will simply answer that burning billions in cash is not a problem, when it is not your money. @pluralistic Do you really know who was owning these billions in today's opaque financial world? Haven't there been enough scandals about bankrupt companies where it was found that valuable assets had been siphoned out before the leaders started a chain of apparently stupid moves? Aren't there enough ways to let the small investors alone with the empty bag? @pluralistic Last but not least: there is an obvious reason to destroy Vice: it published good articles. If there is one thing that people in power hate, it is good journalists. They are the people who tend to discover scandals, they are the people who write articles about things they prefer to keep hidden. At the very least, they write stuff which is more interesting to read than advertisements and in the ideal corporate world out eyeball time would be 100% used for propaganda. |
Gregory's Server
For those of you who don't know, Vice was a Canadian media success story. It was founded by a motley clique of hipsters, one of whom - founder of the Proud Boys - has since grown to be one of the world's great fascism influencers. Another perfected the art of getting young people to work "for exposure" even as he built a massive, highly lucrative media empire on their free labor:
https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/vice-oral-history/
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