Caught in a Vice
Vice, once the edgy upstart disrupting digital media, is reportedly making preparations to file for bankruptcy unless the company can find a last-minute buyer in the coming weeks.
The news of Vice Media’s apparent demise comes less than 2 weeks after the shuttering of BuzzFeed News and against an ever-widening backdrop of layoffs that have rocked the media world throughout 2023.
Don’t believe the hype
Vice started life as a bootstrapped, independent punk magazine in Montreal back in 1994, a far cry from the media giant that the company would become. At its 2010s peak the Vice Media empire sprawled across multiple websites, its own TV channel, a record label, shows on HBO, an ad agency, and even a production company — a stable of content that attracted some of the biggest investors in media.
A $70m investment from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox saw Vice capture a valuation of $1.4bn in 2013. That figure increased quickly as outside investors looked to ride the wave of brash, digitally-native new media that was equally comfortable exposing warlords or exploring social taboos — all at a time when the “firehose” of web traffic from Facebook was fairly predictable.
Vice’s expansion earned a $400m injection from Disney in 2015, with a $450m investment from PE firm TPG 2 years later — a deal that saw the company reach its peak valuation of $5.7 billion.
Many things could be blamed for its financial difficulties, but as one former Vice exec put it "at some point, what got you there isn’t what you are", suggesting that what made Vice's content work with a few hundred journalists, never worked quite as well at 3,000 employees — the company's peak headcount in 2017.
