
Vice Media Lays Off 155 Employees with Deepest Cuts in Digital Group - burnaboy
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/vice-media-layoffs-155-employees-covid19-1234607610/
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yowlingcat
Countercultural media is a fickle beast. The edginess that gains you notoriety
has a shelf life. And yet, there are a thousand ways for the maturation from
that awkward adolescence into adulthood to fail. It happened rather
dramatically for the Gawker empire. It appears that it will be in a more
Byzantine manner for Vice.

I certainly wondered if after the controversial albeit effective founder
(Gaven McInnes) leaving/the firm going public, it was only a matter of time.
Perhaps so.

~~~
coldtea
How is Vice "countercultural"? A notch more mainstream and it would be the
Readers Digest...

~~~
vzidex
They used to be, that's how they got started. I remember watching their videos
in the early 2010s on drugs - including one where the host of the video flew
to the Czech Republic to do heroin there.

Now? Yeah, I wouldn't call them counter-cultural anymore.

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sacks2k
I'm not surprised.

Vice media used to be about cutting-edge reporting and has devolved to fluff
pieces centered around a progressive agenda.

~~~
freewilly1040
A company laying people off is not confirmation that the things you don't like
about them are hurting their business. It just might have more to do with the
pandemic than their politics.

~~~
Clubber
Perhaps, but regarding the pandemic, I would assume the pandemic would cause
people to read _more_ digital news than before, simply because they have more
time to do so.

For example, video game sales have had a really great last quarter.

~~~
ardy42
> Perhaps, but regarding the pandemic, I would assume the pandemic would cause
> people to read more digital news than before, simply because they have more
> time to do so.

People may read more during the pandemic, but the advertisers are advertising
less:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-
vice-m...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vice-media-
layoffs/vice-media-lays-off-155-employees-as-coronavirus-pandemic-wipes-out-
ad-revenue-idUSKBN22R2N3):

> Vice Media lays off 155 employees as coronavirus pandemic wipes out ad
> revenue

> ...The cuts come as the news media industry suffers from an epic drop in
> advertising revenue as companies cut spending amid the pandemic.

> Digital media companies, including Quartz and Buzzfeed, have slashed jobs,
> furloughed employees and cut salaries in an effort to survive the outbreak.

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und3rth3iP
This week has been brutal one for media layoffs. Also: Conde Nast, Quartz and
BuzzFeed.

And for the bulk of these laid off folks, this will likely mean their time in
journalism is done. The odds of there being many opportunities in the industry
after the pandemic seem pretty low right now..

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alephnan
> Vice Digital’s teams will be disproportionately affected by the layoffs.
> Currently, the company’s digital organization accounts for 50% of headcount
> costs, “but only brings in about 21% of our revenue”

> “everyone will be able to keep their work-issued laptops”

~~~
almostaf82
This happens a lot because of logistics costs. Managing inventory means hiring
people. The total cost of the laptops is probably less than salary + benefits
for a staff to handle it and storage or sell at huge discount

~~~
sethhochberg
I used to run an all-remote engineering team and even though we had the right
personnel in place, it still often ended up that for anything short of a new
top-of-the-line device, it would be left with a departing employee as a gift
because the cost of shipping and paying import duties to get it to the next
most logical person in line to have possession of the device was often more
than the value of the device itself.

Even for high-value hardware that might have been financially worth reclaiming
at the end of someone's employment, there was always a buyout clause in their
hardware issuance agreement and we encouraged people to use it if they liked
their laptop. We _really_ didn't want the gear back most of the time.

~~~
ghaff
Last time I turned in a laptop (which was about 6 years old--wasn't my day-to-
day system), I had to go through the whole routine of reformatting, cleaning
stickers and the like off as well as I could, and shipping it to our IT
department. I'm sure it was just recycled when it arrived.

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minimaxir
The entire media industry has been doing layoffs/furloughs. It's a function of
revenue pipelines and forecasts even _despite_ diversification; it is not
correlated to the specific content/brand of a media company.

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xoxoy
I’m still wondering how the stock market is assuming that tech cos that rely
heavily on digital ad spend like Google and FB are effectively recession proof
even though media outlets with the same business model are clearly not.

~~~
newacct583
This is a big question for me too. I mean, the next quarterly results are
going to be brutal, everyone knows that. The end of the pandemic is going to
be a slow recovery like every other slow recovery, everyone knows that too.
There's no magic way to make an economy "bounce" when doing that would entail
getting a whole bunch of shuttered businesses back up and running.

Yet the market just doesn't show it. And I've seen no good explanations.

For myself, btw: I'm mostly in bond funds and cash accounts at this point.
There just has to be another severe crash coming in the next few months.

~~~
birdyrooster
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23133086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23133086)

I have rotated half into Gold ETFs and the rest into cash for the next few
months to do some bearish options trading.

~~~
newacct583
You do realize that gold crashed along with everything else in March, right?

~~~
birdyrooster
Gold took a tumble in March but it was nowhere near as bad as the DJIA and the
charts bear this out. Also the monetary supply has significantly increased
since then which and gold is not strongly dependent on retail consumer demand
or other short cycles where uncertainty is injected. While Apple still has to
operate and sell phones during the pandemic, Gold just sits there with all of
its glorious potential.

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motohagiography
Given PPP and other covid unemployment funding programs, %5 of staff seems
like an opportunistic easy win to churn out the expensive and/or older staff,
with the option of picking up new cheaper staff in this buyers market for
talent. The demographics of the layoff would be interesting. The sympathetic
tone of that CEO letter is the insult to injury for them.

I know large chain retailers who have laid off all retail staff and only kept
operations, marketing and digital, so this doesn't register as a big story.
That something to do with Vice isn't really news is perhaps par for the
course, but as the shutdown progresses, there could be waves of layoffs like
this to show a bump in their Q3 results.

~~~
WillPostForFood
The ad revenue drop is real. 50+% decline with some of the companies I work
with. Even with PPP 5% seems like a small cut, not opportunistic.

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gabagoo
Worked there back in the day, some companies truly were never meant to scale.

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goatinaboat
I don’t like to see anyone lose their job but the Internet if not the entire
world will be better off without Vice, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, HuffPo, Gawker and
all similar trash clickbait outfits

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dv_dt
I didn't know Vice had non-digital media?

~~~
nkozyra
It was pretty huge in late 90s / early 00s New York as a physical
entity/product. It seemed to die down for about 5 years or so before bouncing
back as a big digital/video property.

