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.
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@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!
@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 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?
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
The thing is, social media's business model is a giant rug-pull. They're not even bothering to hide their playbook anymore. For social media, the game is to get media companies to become reliant on third parties to reach their audiences. Once that reliance is established, the companies turn down - or even halt - the ability of those media companies to reach their audience altogether. Then, they charge the media companies to reach their audiences:
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.
encourage
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:
encourage
Predicting that a social media platform will rug the media companies that depend on it today doesn't take a Sun Tzu - as cunning strategies go, the hamfisted tactics of FB, Twitter and Tiktok make gambits like "Lucy and the football" look like von Clausewitz.
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.
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:
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."
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:
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!
@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.
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