American Vice Media Project Collapses After 30 Years: How and Why It Happened

The American media website Vice, with nearly 30 years of history, has ceased operations, with its last publications dated February 23. This is reported by RTVI.

Vice Media's leadership has determined that the site is not profitable and announced the layoff of hundreds of employees. What made this media outlet unique and why is its closure considered one of the biggest failures in the media sector?

Vice Media's CEO Bruce Dixon stated in a letter to employees that the company is fully transitioning to a "studio model" business and plans to distribute Vice's content, including news, through its own social networks and other media platforms as part of a partnership strategy.

Dixon wrote that the new strategy will require resource optimization and will mean staff reductions, with employees to be further informed starting February 26.

Vice emerged as a digital media project in 1996, two years after childhood friends Shane Smith and Gavin McInnes, along with Suroosh Alvi, launched the Voice of Montreal magazine and founded Vice Media. Until 2011, the Vice project was housed on viceland.com.

The Washington Post has called Vice's closure "one of the biggest media failures in recent times." The publication notes that as recently as 2017, Vice Media was one of the most valuable media companies in history, valued at $5.7 billion, with investments from giants like Disney and 21st Century Fox.

However, in the spring of 2023, the company announced bankruptcy and was acquired by former creditors for $350 million. The bankruptcy was a "humiliation" for a project that positioned itself against "traditional" media and successfully convinced investors and advertisers for years that it could capture the affluent millennial audience, claims The New York Times.

As the publication clarified, the generous funding came with stringent demands for Vice to increase its profits.

Coincidentally, just when Vice Media reached its financial peak in 2017, scandals emerged within the company that undermined confidence in its management practices. These involved sexual harassment of female employees by management; it came to light that several women who had accused managers a decade earlier were fired, only to later receive compensation.

Top executives at Vice Media acknowledged these facts and publicly apologized.

Later, as the company gradually piled up debts to creditors, it made unsuccessful attempts to sell. In 2022, Vice Media negotiated for several months to sell to the Greek broadcaster Antenna Group for about $1.5 billion. However, by the end of that year, the company had earned just over $100 million against a projected profit of $700 million, and the deal fell through, wrote The Wall Street Journal.

Before Vice's operations ceased, the company was undergoing cycles of layoffs and restructuring. In 2023, shortly after filing for bankruptcy, it shut down its flagship news program, Vice News Tonight, which aired on HBO and Vice TV.