I'm in the "this decision is stupid" camp, but just playing devil's advocate here, they might not want to risk damaging their brand by letting some third party agency mishandle their website
Don't include the brand in the deal, just the content?
Which then defeats the whole purpose of keeping the bookmarks / URLs / SEO surface alive as the domain is kinda part of the brand if it’s vice.com.
Absolutely. It's all over the videos themselves too.
Yeah depends if the Vice brand carries on. If it does then this needs to be managed which gets rid of the “brush soot off hands; not my problem” advantage.