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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Well Vice.com destroyed themselves after the founder left and was taken over.

Ever since, they ran themselves into the ground and raised so much money all for what? Only for their website to be shut down after being bankrupt. All faster than their own deranged Twitter / X collapse predictions.

Nothing of value was lost.

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Shane Smith, who documented his own set up in one of the episodes? Which was about the cancer miracle cure.

> Shane Smith, who documented his own set up in one of the episodes?

Please elaborate.

>Nothing of value was lost.

Place your bets on what will die next. HuffPo? Vox? Salon (which I know had a near-death experience a few years ago; I doubt its financial health is any better now)?

HuffPo is so clickbaity and ad filled I cannot imagine it going anywhere.

Salon is also awful - it’ll be nice when they’re done

They’ll be fine as long as Trump wins the next election.

The ad revenue from having even one of your daily “orange man bad” articles hit the top of a dozen massive subreddits a few times a week can sustain any business.

I think you were downvoted by people who so viscerally can’t stand the idea of Trump winning they need to silence anyone that might dare to say it… which entirely proves your point market that a media outlet can sustain on.

> Place your bets on what will die next.

The next one is Huffington Post (owned by Buzzfeed) then Buzzfeed itself.

Either they need to be bought out or they will need to do more layoffs to increase their runway and make sure that they meet the stock price requirement of >$1.00 to avoid being delisted by May 2024.

> Either they need to be bought out or they will need to do more layoffs to increase their runway and make sure that they meet the stock price requirement of >$1.00 to avoid being delisted by May 2024.

I think this was the "near-death experience" I was thinking of regarding Salon. Didn't Salon do a reverse stock split to meet the price requirement? Can Buzzfeed do this too?

Vox is diversified enough across publications (sports, trad media like NY mag, vox.com) and platforms (video, movies, etc) that they will be fine. They may never deliver the multiples they promised investors but their investors don't care -- Accel and Allen & Co types didn't put a ton into them, NBCU and Penske are probably just happy Vox hasn't folded like BF and Vice... Vox is solid in the world of media but certainly failed in what they promised to achieve. Still though, just surviving is a high measure of success in the hellscape that is VC funded online media.

You know, Vice had some genuinely great and groundbreaking journalism when it started out. I don't know if that was pure luck, or whether it started out as its best self and then regressed to the mean. On the other hand, Slate started out mediocre and has butt-scooted along the ground for decades, while Vox and HuffPo were just trash from day one. We lost something that could have been of value with Vice, even if we lost it a long time ago. But with the others, good riddance.

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