Vice has filed for bankruptcy and its content management system was shut down yesterday:
Vice.com has stopped publishing new content and laid off several hundred employees, its CEO announced late on Thursday. The outlet once valued at billions of dollars had to be rescued from bankruptcy last year, by a consortium including George Soros.
The website is still available, but its content management system was shut down minutes before midnight, according to one employee. The VICE company will “transition to a studio model,” CEO Bruce Dixon said in a message sent to the staff, as part of “fundamental changes to our strategic vision.”
“We create and produce outstanding original content true to the Vice brand. However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously,” Dixon wrote. Going forward, Vice will partner with “established media companies” to distribute its digital content on their platforms instead.
Funded by major corporations and venture capital throughout the 2010s, Vice was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017.
It’s fascinating to compare the fragility of a large, massively-well funded operation like Vice with the antifragility of small, independent operations like UATV. While UATV can survive multiple hits that reduce its revenue to zero for as long as it takes to build the subscriber base back again… and again, the use of debt means that not even a bailout from George Soros is sufficient to keep a Clown World institution like Vice afloat.
Everything about Clown World is fake, pride, and short-lived.