Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff(nymag.com) |
Vice Media: A Company Built on a Bluff(nymag.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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?
Twitter and Vice Media(as opposed to just the magazine) both have origins of 2006.
From the article:
>"In 2006, Vice started Virtue, a cheekily named ad agency that allowed the magazine to deploy its creative talents on behalf of brands. A year later, Vice became one of the first digital-media outlets to get into online video with vbs.tv, a digital-video site funded with a $2 million investment from Viacom."
Money just retains control of the industry on the long-term.
It's all about the power, and influence.
Murdoch isn't invested in Vice for shits.
If you bot hard enough you can get real investors and advertisers to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars.
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. :(
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!
Some of their documentaries now are just total BS, like the "world's scariest drug" which is just about Scopolamine.
Too bad because I used to love Vice documentaries and now I can't stand them at all.
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.
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.
Best media magazine then now an empire.
X
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.
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.
sidebar: i still feel bad about that poor tea girl.
the quality went downhill and i've stopped following them a few years ago. but back in the day, they were excellent as far as gonzo journalism goes.
There are definitely reporters I like more. For instance Ben Anderson always brings a lot of context to the minutiae of the many wars. Elle Reeves (charlottesville) also usually has interesting stories, lots of times focusing on kind of the opposite of my morality; Showing perspectives from the racist right and people like the 'pick up' artist who is actually more a misogynistic pimp.
I also consider myself a fairly heavy news consumer as I work in politics and read throughout the day.
I remember the days when Vice let people freely decide what to think about child soldiers, drug smugglers or donkey lovers. Today their one-sided ideological perspective makes it just cringeworthy to watch.
Wha?
Err, what?
Seems like it worked out great for the early investors.
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.
I'd argue that South Park actually matured and toned things down on one hand, and amped things up on the other.
Their early episodes relied heavily on shock value. The later seasons are more nuanced, and rely less on gross out, bodily humor, or people laughing at cartoon kids swearing.
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.