61–70 of 78 posts
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.
> 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.
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 clic…
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.
> 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. :(
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 clic…
I actually watch Vice News Tonight every night. I'm a well off 29 year old white male for demo info. I find they often cover stories I haven't heard about and their foreign war reporting I think is fairly unique outside of like a dedicated Frontline episode. 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 (charlottesvil…
Rather than showing alternate perspectives she moralises, plays straight into virtue signaling and all the other things wrong with the current great divide that society is becoming.
You come out of the Charlottesville episode having no idea what's really going on, just reinforcement of the predefined values you already had. There was no attempt to understand it, it was just a "Yes, it's us against them" view point.
Unlike earlier Vice which did have value, it just reported. They just showed it the way it was and allowed a lot more facts come through.
The Charlottesville episode had zero value if you actually wanted analysis of the situation and learn about the movements and politics at play.
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.
> 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.
> 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. :(
Also Glasslands and 285 Kent all in that same block! 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!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took Twitter 10 years to turn a profit: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/08/twitter-... 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.
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…
> 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.
Elon Musk recently said profit isn't what drives his company, which isn't much different than what the CRO was saying here.