Vice Media Lays Off 155 Employees with Deepest Cuts in Digital Group

The racist, mysogynist cofounder is gunna be a hard thing for me to forget when I think about Vice going forward.

There is Deadspin in the Gawker portfolio which I think was a great example of the natural maturation you are talking about. The style of the site and what they covered definitely matured over the years, but that same defiant ethos stuck around until and was perhaps defined by the very the moment the entire team mass resigned in response to mismanagement. And it is interesting to note that multiple writers who resigned from Deadspin ended up at Vice.

In other words, I believe they are in decline because they are trying to be "woke". and as they say when you go woke you go broke.

That is hardly a countercultral media outlet position nowadays

The irony here is that vice, huffpo, buzzfeed, etc demanded social media censor fringe "alt-right" media and start favoring more established media. They got their wish. Now google, youtube, facebook, etc heavily favors CNN, MSNBC, Foxnews, NYTimes, WaPo, etc. It still shocks me how oblivious these people were. They depended entirely on social media providing an equal playing field to everyone. And yet, they were the ones demanding social media companies play favorites.

At this point, what is there but to just laugh at them. Nobody should feel sorry for these people/companies as they got what they asked for. Censorship and favoritism. The funny thing is that most likely the alt-right media will outlast vice, huffpo, buzzfeed, etc.

Spoiler: She didn't cry after shooting a firearm.

Unlike Vice they might actually be fine though, because I think Vox's readers seek out that far left bias, whereas Vice's customers were more mixed. That said, I am largely basing this based on my anecdotal experience and speculating about the overall readership of these publications.

This journalist has had it out for comedy that he finds funny or offensive.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/av4z45/the-bill-and-ted-s...

Vice was never anything more than editorialized content pushing some agenda. Way early on they had some interesting stuff like the inside North Korea videos, but those days are long gone.

Edit: Yes I'm still bitter over Bill and Ted being cancelled.

This is the hole all the big news and media houses fell into.

I don't think a lot of these companies really understood what the transaction they were making when they pivoted or expanded. When an outlet like Vice peddles fluff, click-bait and controversy pieces, the transaction is not videos/articles for clicks.

With those fluff pieces, Vice and others were trading away trust and reputation, which is the core product of any information business. In a time where truth and trust are desperately needed, the big media houses should have been making bank (My god, in the information age, why can't the original information businesses make money?).

Instead they bankrupted their core product for quick cash because they accidentally equated their product (Trust) with what they were selling (advertisements), and that lowered the whole industry to the point where they have to share space with the likes of Infowars.

A lot longer than any media outlet.

For every vertical that went down (ie, mortgages, local small business ads) there's plenty of others that go up (ie, health insurance, consumer ecommerce).

I don't think media buys on newspapers are a significant amount of Google et al's ad business, adwords (ie, search based ads) is much bigger than adsense (display advertising). Search for any major keyword and you'll still find the SERP flooded with ad results. I'd imagine generally it's gone down for Google but I doubt it's by much total.

Yet the market just doesn't show it. And I've seen no good explanations.

For myself, btw: I'm mostly in bond funds and cash accounts at this point. There just has to be another severe crash coming in the next few months.