15 ms·

Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff

183 points by peeze 8y ago

mvidal01 8y ago
David Carr of the NYT (RIP David Carr) had some nice words for Vice - http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/01/david_carr_puts_vice_founder_i.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/01/david_carr_puts...
- manigandham 8y ago
  It was great to see him interact with them, here's a video version: https://www.nytimes.com/video/business/100000003509105/page-one-david-carr-confronts-vice.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/business/100000003509105/page-...
tqi 8y ago
The company culture sounds absolutely toxic, and the leadership team sounds both ill prepared and unethical.
mkirklions 8y ago
Wow did the writer get fired from Vice? I thought all of this was pretty normal for companies starting to grow. Yeah sales/marketing always is scummy, but its 2018, do you think FB says I'm an 'active user' despite me only going on it 1 time a month? You bet.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I thought all of this was pretty normal for companies starting to grow. No, it's not normal at all. It's normal for scam artists and Silicon Valley and used car salesmen. But no, it's now how real businesses start and grow. Henry Ford, JD Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Walt Disney didn't go around bragging about "doing blow on naked models." OK, maybe Rockefeller.
  - workinthehead 8y ago
    Nice "No true Scotsman" you got there.
sbarre 8y ago
The key point in the article is that the Vice we see today really didn't start until 2010, and it has nothing much to do with Vice magazine that existed in the late 90s and early 2000s..
Dirlewanger 8y ago
Being one of the few pre-Internet media companies to still be around in some form today, their story is pretty fascinating. It clearly hasn't worked out for the better though. Vice on HBO, while covering a massive breadth of topics, suffer from their presentation; their nasally-voiced mid 20s employees they send on documentaries are mostly boredom-inducing, and their various online news outlets are Buzzfeed-tier clickbait with the occasional well-researched piece.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  IFC's documentary parody series Documentary Now! (https://www.ifc.com/shows/documentary-now https://www.ifc.com/shows/documentary-now) did a great episode in its first season called "DRONEZ: The Hunt for El Chingon" that is an hilarious, pitch-perfect sendup of the Vice documentary style. It's on Netflix, if memory serves.
  - creaghpatr 8y ago
    I think that captures the zeitgeist really well. Vice is now just a pale imitation of what used to be true cultural 'edginess'.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - froasty 8y ago
      That's the crux of relying upon transgression for value--it ages rapidly and if it obtains mainstream success, dies on the spot. You can see it happen with authors, musicians, writers, essentially any creative output. In terms of popular media, the early seasons of South Park and the Simpsons look absolutely saccharine compared to where culture's Overton Window is today. "Don't have a cow, man!" is positively benign.
      - newnewpdro 8y ago
        > "Don't have a cow, man!" is positively benign. To think I was once taken to the principal's office for wearing this on a bart simpson t-shirt, which they told me to turn inside out. I of course refused, culminating in a very difficult day for the authority figures involved.
trashbat-co-ck 8y ago
That is well plastic. Peace and fuckin'.
TimJYoung 8y ago
They seem to have originally tried to make themselves in the mold of National Lampoon, but someone that actually read the magazine in the 90s could probably comment more on this. I was busy having kids and raising a family, so I didn't get much of a chance to read such content. Along those lines: if you get a chance, check out "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead" on Netflix. I was too young and missed the best parts of National Lampoon, watching the later 80s movies mostly and never reading the magazine, but images like "I Survived the Attack of the Krazed Kent Kamikaze Kids" are sheer brilliance.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  A closer historical analogue to what Vice has tried to do is probably Rolling Stone. Today Rolling Stone is utterly dispensable, so it can be hard to imagine; but in the '70s it was what Vice so desperately wants to be today, a sort of journal-of-record for youth culture. If you wanted to know where the edge was, Rolling Stone had writers like Lester Bangs and Hunter S. Thompson who could show you.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Or like a combination of Playboy's non-pictural literature with Spy magazine's insider snark.
staticelf 8y ago
Vice was once a company that made very interesting documentaries and pieces that no one else did. Today, they seem to be a gang of social justice warriors that is completely out of touch with reality. Too bad because I used to love Vice documentaries and now I can't stand them at all.
- anm89 8y ago
  This is exactly how I feel. I have no interest in what vice has become (except for the fact that a small fraction of their content is still very good) but it doesn't erase how good they used to be. Many of the documentaries from maybe 2009-2013 where exceptional. Yeah, it isn't journalism, but it isn't trying to be. Some of the narrators are pretentious but they presented content in a format that was frequently much more interesting and relatable than some stuffy, detached doc and they clearly went to the ends of the world and into some very dangerous and uncomfortable situations to get that footage. I learned a lot about the world watching old Vice docs.
poisonarena 8y ago
I grew up in Berkeley California and every couple weeks in my sophmore year of HS in 2003 I would go up to Amoeba music, to grab the latest issue, and figure out what was cool, Dos and Donts, Guide to Anal sex, what have you. In 2009 my electronic music group Party Effects used to burn CD's, and then infilitrate the various distribution points of VICE magazine to include a copy of our Electronic Music Compilations.. To no success.. but alas The print magazine, complete with racy American Apparel ads was a part of my childhood. I dont know what happened or how they became a multinational news organization. Last year I did the music for an ad they did in Mexico City in a partnership with Samsung, and I thought I was being pretty cool, till they only payed me about $300 bucks in pesos, 5 weeks after I finished it. I have met many Vice magazine employees in Condesa CDMX and almost all make practicly nothing, but do it because it is 'cool', maybe their parents were rich. Interesting article, but I always guessed they were scummy, but thats allright..
- werber 8y ago
  I grew up with a similar relationship to vice and the horror stories of cool points in place of real money later on, from almost every one I know that's worked for them in any capacity turned me off and most of the people i know in those circles
gringoDan 8y ago
> When I asked Dominique Delport, the chief revenue officer, whether the company was profitable, he declined to say and suggested that dollar figures were the wrong way to think about Vice. “The company profit is to everybody who watches Vice, because they feel smarter,” he said. Investors should run away as quickly as possible. If that quote from the Chief Revenue Officer isn't a red flag, I don't know what is.
- lainga 8y ago
  What do you mean? That's the way journalism works. "Don't think about salaries or dollar figures, think about the exposure you'll be getting!"
- class4behavior 8y ago
  You're equating a conversation with a journalist (=the public) with one with an investor, though.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  It took Twitter 10 years to turn a profit: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/08/twitter-turns-profit-but-problems-remain/318744002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/08/twitter-... To suggest that an investor can't earn a profit by putting cash into a business with a burn rate is as sophomoric as believing you can run a business on investor money without ever turning a profit.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    > It took Twitter 10 years to turn a profit: So a company took 10 years of burning through cash until a moment it didn't. Is that supposed to mean it was a sound investment?
    - godzillabrennus 8y ago
electricslpnsld 8y ago
> taking over a 75,000-square-foot space in South Williamsburg occupied in part by Death by Audio, a local music venue RIP, DBA! I always found it somewhat ironic that Vice, with roots in being edgy and punk, drove away one of Brooklyn’s top DIY edgy music venues. With Silent Barn also closing it’s been a sad five years for DIY in Brooklyn. :(
- mtalantikite 8y ago
  Also Glasslands and 285 Kent all in that same block! Sometimes it’s hard to believe how wild things really were 10 years ago.
  - electricslpnsld 8y ago
    > Sometimes it’s hard to believe how wild things really were 10 years ago. Tell me about it! I moved into a (100% illegal) squat off the Morgan stop in 2008 after high school... that neighborhood was blast back then. The bicycle club below us was shut down because they were moving automatic weapons through a daycare center (who sends their toddlers to an MC-run daycare center?). Kind of crazy how quickly NYC has changed!
kruhft 8y ago
I remember the first time I saw a Vice magazine, back in Vancouver just sitting on the ground in a pile right past the Burrard Street Bridge. Best media magazine then now an empire. X
j-c-hewitt 8y ago
The interesting thing in this is coming right out with how the company built its numbers with botted traffic and referrer-spammed traffic. This is generally under-remarked upon because everyone except for advertisers tends to want to not mention this common practice. If you bot hard enough you can get real investors and advertisers to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars.
- subsystemm 8y ago
  Fully agreed. This is the meat of the article.
class4behavior 8y ago
The business part aside, vice news and vice, those programs on hbo, offer very informative, undervalued stories. It would be a pity if that format were gone. Vice coverage may be sometimes sensationalist or activist, but its pros by far outweigh its weaknesses.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Wasn't the only reason vice got bought by cnn because zucker's teenage son told his dad "this is where people my age read the news"?
DoubleCribble 8y ago
One of the other co-founders, Suroosh Alvi, was interviewed on How I Built This awhile back: https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=547933499:547934223 https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=547933499:547934223
stef25 8y ago
I remember seeing a copy of the actual magazine in London at the end of the 90s, the entire cover was reflective like a mirror and it had a big line of white powder on it. It was pretty cool and unique as a anti establishment punk mag back then. Some of their documentaries now are just total BS, like the "world's scariest drug" which is just about Scopolamine.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
keyle 8y ago
Wow quite the story. I always wondered where that brand popped up. Now that I know the full story, I hope to see its demise. It embodies everything that's wrong with this world of idiocracy: do the biggest shit and get away with it.
- wpietri 8y ago
  Same. When I read the #metoo article about them, I asked HBO to drop them. HBO never even bothered to reply, so I canceled my subscription. This article made me glad I had.
- rosege 8y ago
  It seems to me that there are far worse candidates for driving idiocracy. In the early days I liked some of the crazy places they sent reporters for the paper. They would go places no one else would and find interesting stories. There was a bit of that in the HBO show. I also liked some of the HBO climate change specials and thought they did a good job of going to the source - e.g. flying with NASA over Antarctica.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

183 points by peeze 8y ago

David Carr of the NYT (RIP David Carr) had some nice words for Vice - http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/01/david_carr_puts_vice_founder_i.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/01/david_carr_puts...

manigandham 8y ago
It was great to see him interact with them, here's a video version: https://www.nytimes.com/video/business/100000003509105/page-one-david-carr-confronts-vice.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/business/100000003509105/page-...

tqi 8y ago

The company culture sounds absolutely toxic, and the leadership team sounds both ill prepared and unethical.

mkirklions 8y ago

Wow did the writer get fired from Vice? I thought all of this was pretty normal for companies starting to grow. Yeah sales/marketing always is scummy, but its 2018, do you think FB says I'm an 'active user' despite me only going on it 1 time a month? You bet.

reaperducer 8y ago
I thought all of this was pretty normal for companies starting to grow. No, it's not normal at all. It's normal for scam artists and Silicon Valley and used car salesmen. But no, it's now how real businesses start and grow. Henry Ford, JD Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Walt Disney didn't go around bragging about "doing blow on naked models." OK, maybe Rockefeller.
- workinthehead 8y ago
  Nice "No true Scotsman" you got there.

sbarre 8y ago

The key point in the article is that the Vice we see today really didn't start until 2010, and it has nothing much to do with Vice magazine that existed in the late 90s and early 2000s..

Dirlewanger 8y ago

Being one of the few pre-Internet media companies to still be around in some form today, their story is pretty fascinating. It clearly hasn't worked out for the better though. Vice on HBO, while covering a massive breadth of topics, suffer from their presentation; their nasally-voiced mid 20s employees they send on documentaries are mostly boredom-inducing, and their various online news outlets are Buzzfeed-tier clickbait with the occasional well-researched piece.

smacktoward 8y ago
IFC's documentary parody series Documentary Now! (https://www.ifc.com/shows/documentary-now https://www.ifc.com/shows/documentary-now) did a great episode in its first season called "DRONEZ: The Hunt for El Chingon" that is an hilarious, pitch-perfect sendup of the Vice documentary style. It's on Netflix, if memory serves.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  I think that captures the zeitgeist really well. Vice is now just a pale imitation of what used to be true cultural 'edginess'.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - froasty 8y ago
    That's the crux of relying upon transgression for value--it ages rapidly and if it obtains mainstream success, dies on the spot. You can see it happen with authors, musicians, writers, essentially any creative output. In terms of popular media, the early seasons of South Park and the Simpsons look absolutely saccharine compared to where culture's Overton Window is today. "Don't have a cow, man!" is positively benign.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      > "Don't have a cow, man!" is positively benign. To think I was once taken to the principal's office for wearing this on a bart simpson t-shirt, which they told me to turn inside out. I of course refused, culminating in a very difficult day for the authority figures involved.

trashbat-co-ck 8y ago

That is well plastic. Peace and fuckin'.

TimJYoung 8y ago

They seem to have originally tried to make themselves in the mold of National Lampoon, but someone that actually read the magazine in the 90s could probably comment more on this. I was busy having kids and raising a family, so I didn't get much of a chance to read such content. Along those lines: if you get a chance, check out "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead" on Netflix. I was too young and missed the best parts of National Lampoon, watching the later 80s movies mostly and never reading the magazine, but images like "I Survived the Attack of the Krazed Kent Kamikaze Kids" are sheer brilliance.

smacktoward 8y ago
A closer historical analogue to what Vice has tried to do is probably Rolling Stone. Today Rolling Stone is utterly dispensable, so it can be hard to imagine; but in the '70s it was what Vice so desperately wants to be today, a sort of journal-of-record for youth culture. If you wanted to know where the edge was, Rolling Stone had writers like Lester Bangs and Hunter S. Thompson who could show you.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Or like a combination of Playboy's non-pictural literature with Spy magazine's insider snark.

staticelf 8y ago

Vice was once a company that made very interesting documentaries and pieces that no one else did. Today, they seem to be a gang of social justice warriors that is completely out of touch with reality. Too bad because I used to love Vice documentaries and now I can't stand them at all.

anm89 8y ago
This is exactly how I feel. I have no interest in what vice has become (except for the fact that a small fraction of their content is still very good) but it doesn't erase how good they used to be. Many of the documentaries from maybe 2009-2013 where exceptional. Yeah, it isn't journalism, but it isn't trying to be. Some of the narrators are pretentious but they presented content in a format that was frequently much more interesting and relatable than some stuffy, detached doc and they clearly went to the ends of the world and into some very dangerous and uncomfortable situations to get that footage. I learned a lot about the world watching old Vice docs.

poisonarena 8y ago

I grew up in Berkeley California and every couple weeks in my sophmore year of HS in 2003 I would go up to Amoeba music, to grab the latest issue, and figure out what was cool, Dos and Donts, Guide to Anal sex, what have you. In 2009 my electronic music group Party Effects used to burn CD's, and then infilitrate the various distribution points of VICE magazine to include a copy of our Electronic Music Compilations.. To no success.. but alas The print magazine, complete with racy American Apparel ads was a part of my childhood. I dont know what happened or how they became a multinational news organization. Last year I did the music for an ad they did in Mexico City in a partnership with Samsung, and I thought I was being pretty cool, till they only payed me about $300 bucks in pesos, 5 weeks after I finished it. I have met many Vice magazine employees in Condesa CDMX and almost all make practicly nothing, but do it because it is 'cool', maybe their parents were rich. Interesting article, but I always guessed they were scummy, but thats allright..

werber 8y ago
I grew up with a similar relationship to vice and the horror stories of cool points in place of real money later on, from almost every one I know that's worked for them in any capacity turned me off and most of the people i know in those circles

gringoDan 8y ago

> When I asked Dominique Delport, the chief revenue officer, whether the company was profitable, he declined to say and suggested that dollar figures were the wrong way to think about Vice. “The company profit is to everybody who watches Vice, because they feel smarter,” he said. Investors should run away as quickly as possible. If that quote from the Chief Revenue Officer isn't a red flag, I don't know what is.

lainga 8y ago
What do you mean? That's the way journalism works. "Don't think about salaries or dollar figures, think about the exposure you'll be getting!"
class4behavior 8y ago
You're equating a conversation with a journalist (=the public) with one with an investor, though.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
godzillabrennus 8y ago
It took Twitter 10 years to turn a profit: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/08/twitter-turns-profit-but-problems-remain/318744002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/08/twitter-... To suggest that an investor can't earn a profit by putting cash into a business with a burn rate is as sophomoric as believing you can run a business on investor money without ever turning a profit.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  > It took Twitter 10 years to turn a profit: So a company took 10 years of burning through cash until a moment it didn't. Is that supposed to mean it was a sound investment?
  - godzillabrennus 8y ago

electricslpnsld 8y ago

> taking over a 75,000-square-foot space in South Williamsburg occupied in part by Death by Audio, a local music venue RIP, DBA! I always found it somewhat ironic that Vice, with roots in being edgy and punk, drove away one of Brooklyn’s top DIY edgy music venues. With Silent Barn also closing it’s been a sad five years for DIY in Brooklyn. :(

mtalantikite 8y ago
Also Glasslands and 285 Kent all in that same block! Sometimes it’s hard to believe how wild things really were 10 years ago.
- electricslpnsld 8y ago
  > Sometimes it’s hard to believe how wild things really were 10 years ago. Tell me about it! I moved into a (100% illegal) squat off the Morgan stop in 2008 after high school... that neighborhood was blast back then. The bicycle club below us was shut down because they were moving automatic weapons through a daycare center (who sends their toddlers to an MC-run daycare center?). Kind of crazy how quickly NYC has changed!

kruhft 8y ago

I remember the first time I saw a Vice magazine, back in Vancouver just sitting on the ground in a pile right past the Burrard Street Bridge. Best media magazine then now an empire. X

j-c-hewitt 8y ago

The interesting thing in this is coming right out with how the company built its numbers with botted traffic and referrer-spammed traffic. This is generally under-remarked upon because everyone except for advertisers tends to want to not mention this common practice. If you bot hard enough you can get real investors and advertisers to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars.

subsystemm 8y ago
Fully agreed. This is the meat of the article.

class4behavior 8y ago

The business part aside, vice news and vice, those programs on hbo, offer very informative, undervalued stories. It would be a pity if that format were gone. Vice coverage may be sometimes sensationalist or activist, but its pros by far outweigh its weaknesses.

oh_sigh 8y ago

Wasn't the only reason vice got bought by cnn because zucker's teenage son told his dad "this is where people my age read the news"?

DoubleCribble 8y ago

One of the other co-founders, Suroosh Alvi, was interviewed on How I Built This awhile back: https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=547933499:547934223 https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=547933499:547934223

stef25 8y ago

I remember seeing a copy of the actual magazine in London at the end of the 90s, the entire cover was reflective like a mirror and it had a big line of white powder on it. It was pretty cool and unique as a anti establishment punk mag back then. Some of their documentaries now are just total BS, like the "world's scariest drug" which is just about Scopolamine.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

keyle 8y ago

Wow quite the story. I always wondered where that brand popped up. Now that I know the full story, I hope to see its demise. It embodies everything that's wrong with this world of idiocracy: do the biggest shit and get away with it.

wpietri 8y ago
Same. When I read the #metoo article about them, I asked HBO to drop them. HBO never even bothered to reply, so I canceled my subscription. This article made me glad I had.
rosege 8y ago
It seems to me that there are far worse candidates for driving idiocracy. In the early days I liked some of the crazy places they sent reporters for the paper. They would go places no one else would and find interesting stories. There was a bit of that in the HBO show. I also liked some of the HBO climate change specials and thought they did a good job of going to the source - e.g. flying with NASA over Antarctica.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]