
Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff - peeze
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/inside-vice-media-shane-smith.html
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gringoDan
> 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.

~~~
godzillabrennus
It took Twitter 10 years to turn a profit:
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/08/twitter-...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/08/twitter-
turns-profit-but-problems-remain/318744002/)

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.

~~~
gringoDan
I wasn’t suggesting that a business needs to be profitable from day one. I was
suggesting that the Chief Revenue Officer should measure revenue &
profitability in dollars and cents, rather than in the number of people that
“feel smarter”.

He could have talked about revenue growth, investing in expansion, CAC
decreasing at scale, etc. There are many ways to approach this question that
demonstrate a quantitative grasp of the business and inspire confidence. His
answer was not one of them.

~~~
fenomas
In the quote you pulled he was talking to the press, right? That's no reason
to assume he gives the same answer to investors, or more generally that he has
no other answers to give.

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Dirlewanger
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.

~~~
sgtmas2006
I love what VICE was ~2005-2010. VICE and what it has become today (see:
VICELAND) is... nothing what it used to be. I love their documentary style
from the 2010 range. The NK documentaries on YouTube were my favorite. They've
turned into like you said a buzzfeed-tier garbage.

~~~
Fricken
I was a student in Montreal in the late 90s, and was on to Vice before it was
cool, when it was just a free alt-weekly punk-ass print rag. It was from outer
space. I read it religiously.

~~~
fowkswe
The do's and don'ts to this day inform my acerbic wit aspirations.

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poisonarena
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
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

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j-c-hewitt
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
Fully agreed. This is the meat of the article.

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electricslpnsld
> 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
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
> 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!

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sbarre
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..

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stef25
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.

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keyle
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.

~~~
rosege
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.

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staticelf
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
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.

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

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class4behavior
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.

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TimJYoung
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
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
Or like a combination of _Playboy_ 's non-pictural literature with _Spy_
magazine's insider snark.

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mvidal01
David Carr of the NYT (RIP David Carr) had some nice words for Vice -
[http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/01/david_carr_puts...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/01/david_carr_puts_vice_founder_i.html)

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

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DoubleCribble
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)

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oh_sigh
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"?

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kruhft
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

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mkirklions
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
_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
Nice "No true Scotsman" you got there.

