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From hipster hype to financial flop: Vice Media, RIP
Blaze Media ^ | 28 Feb 2024 | Ken Lacorte

Posted on 02/28/2024 7:39:12 PM PST by Rummyfan

The company did things that might have sent a guy called Trump to jail ... Like paying someone to pretend he was an MTV executive interested in a show to mislead a reporter profiling the company. Or having Vice employees bring friends with laptops to pose as workers.

Vice was accused of using hidden techniques to artificially inflate its audience numbers. According to one of Smith’s former girlfriends, “Shane would talk all the time about how stupid people were for giving them money.” ...

An early, important investor was my ex-boss, Rupert Murdoch, whom Smith reportedly told, “I have Gen Y, I have social, I have online video. You have none of that. I have the future; you have the past.”

It worked. Murdoch invested $70 million in 2013, pushing Vice’s valuation to $1.4 billion.

A few months later, I noticed a problem. At the time, I ran FoxNews.com and was looking to boost our social media presence. Analyzing other media outlets, it became apparent to me that Vice’s Facebook numbers were inflated to the point of nonsense....

Since the boss had just dropped $70 million, I thought I should give him a heads-up. After a meeting, I mentioned what I had found to Rupert, summarizing it as “they’re full of s**t.”

I expected him to be perhaps a tad bit worried, but that wasn’t in Rupert’s DNA. He just chuckled and said, “Of course they’re full of s**t.”

The next year, a venture-capital firm and A&E invested $500 million, raising Vice’s valuation to $2.5 billion. By 2017, another $450 million investment pushed its worth to nearly $6 billion.

Money like that buys a lot of video production, articles, and audience. With it, Vice spawned two feature film studios, a publishing arm, a cable TV channel, and more.

All gone.

(Excerpt) Read more at theblaze.com ...


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; Politics; Society; TV/Movies
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 02/28/2024 7:39:12 PM PST by Rummyfan
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To: Rummyfan
Related:

How the cult of Vice came crashing down

2 posted on 02/28/2024 7:41:15 PM PST by Rummyfan (In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.)
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To: Rummyfan

So this might be a good time to “invest” in Bitcoin?
Actually, that is a joke.
A billionaire (Rupert) occasionally can’t tell what is a solid investment.
I sure don’t have his kind of money to throw around.


3 posted on 02/28/2024 8:00:35 PM PST by Honest Nigerian
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To: Rummyfan

Sorta breaks your heart, doesn’t it?


4 posted on 02/28/2024 8:34:08 PM PST by wjcsux (On 3/14/1883 Karl Marx gave humanity his best gift, he died. )
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To: Rummyfan

Must have missed them.

Sounds like an iFag phone/social masturbation site thing, so no shock.


5 posted on 02/28/2024 9:09:56 PM PST by doorgunner69 (When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty)
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To: Rummyfan

Sounds like a classic “pump and dump” scheme.


6 posted on 02/28/2024 10:02:13 PM PST by GulliverSwift
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To: GulliverSwift

Reddit will be next. They have announced an IPO. A few years ago they valued the company at $10 billion then a year later it was $5 billion. No current valuation as the IPO details are being worked on. That is a 50% drop. I figure they will be committing stock fraud and give out fake user numbers.

The news article I saw was at Yahoo and the comments were almost all negative towards Reddit. They censor and ban users all the time. Not just a ban but a permanent ban where they track your pc or cell phone if you create another account and log in.

You cannot have a successful business doing that.
The owners will become rich, the company will decline and the investors will lose lots of money and like Vice and many others will disappear.


7 posted on 02/29/2024 12:31:38 AM PST by minnesota_bound (Need more money to buy everything now)
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To: minnesota_bound

Reddit lost almost all their conservative users when they banned r/The_Donald in 2020. That user base is still going strong today at https://patriots.win/

So essentially they threw away a huge clientele.

I post memes and links from PDW here all the time.


8 posted on 02/29/2024 1:49:05 AM PST by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: minnesota_bound

The only people reddit bans or censors are conservatives. just the thought of saying “ a man cant give birth is akin to poking a hole inside a volcano. You will quickly realize that was a bad idea on that site.


9 posted on 02/29/2024 3:27:48 AM PST by Ikeon (Why is it acceptable to be a fool but, wrong to point it out? )
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To: Ikeon

8 & 9: I see that Reddit on X hardly has any posts.
https://twitter.com/Reddit

Reddit hasn’t turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but it just filed to go public anyway
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/23/tech/reddit-ipo-filing-business-plan/index.html

Cannot make money son they commit stock fraud like facebook and twitter when they first came out. Google was caught placing advertisers ads on ad farms where hardly no one would see. When caught their response was to discount future ads....


10 posted on 02/29/2024 9:11:19 AM PST by minnesota_bound (Need more money to buy everything now)
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