Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/22/panicked-vice-staffers-warned-to-back-up-stories-and-execs-wont-deny-rumors-its-shutting-down.html
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I have 424 Vice articles that I’ll have to redirect to Wayback links. Fuck.
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Glad they might be stored by Wayback at least. What a public service that site is.
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Didn’t we know this already? Or knew it was coming?
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Worked next door to their London offices, which was some expensive real estate, and they had a nice place, wonder what it will become.
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From the article
Beyond “a place to hang advertising”, I’m not across the details of how media outlets make money. I know newspapers were decimated by smartphones; that’s very old news. But what changed between 2017 and now in digital publishing that a $5.7B juggernaut could go broke?
It really amazed me that the Vice of my youth became a huge media conglomerate. It would be akin to BoingBoing building it’s magazine empire until they were Conde Nast.
That part about not having a budget for the year hit home though, my company keeps telling me we’re ok yet our department doesn’t have a budget for the year yet. 
edit:Budget, not budge
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nobody uses the internet anymore, it’s too crowded
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When Vice became a whole media empire, I kept thinking, “Oh, same name, but obviously unconnected to the magazine. No, wait, what?!” It took a few years for it to sink in.
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They’re about three years late, you can’t even read numerous pages from just like 10 years ago. Ex: The entirety of the Vice exclusive pages of Lauren Mongers comic Habits are dead pages that just say “FYI this story is over 5 years old” and a page full of broken image links.
“But what changed between 2017 and now in digital publishing that a $5.7B juggernaut could go broke?”
The big 5 internet companies have almost completed their cornering of the online advertising market, and are doing everything in their power to strangle out any and all other competitors. ‘Enshittification’ is an apt description of the process.
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There’s a bunch of reasons all coming together that bring the profitability of online media right down since 2017
First of all, back in 2017, is just the point where online content creation has just invested hard into producing lots of video content, because that’s where all the ad money is.
Then it turns out, the traffic that this was based on was mostly fake, so advertisers kick up a fuss and direct their spend elsewhere- Bad luck content creators who have just invested heavily in video.
The next thing is that online ad spending is stagnating overall, so the ad rates on the content that does get put out are stagnating.
Then, it also turns out that that ad spend is being divided amongst even more content creators, with the rise of professional youtubers, the podcast boom and all this newsletter business.
And on top of that, you’ve got ongoing total Enshittification of the online advertising business, which is in the hands of a power-hungry duopoly, who think that their fair share of the revenue is “all of it, then some more”.
So, not a good time to be in the “online journalism” business.
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So much for “the internet will be far more permanent than a library”… I am actually entirely unsurprised that preserving the digital landscape needs just as much work as does preserving physical materials.
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Yes, but they keep steering into dangerous legal waters, and I’m afraid that someone will try to sink them. (Music industry, publishers, or Peter Thiel some embarrassed and pissed-off billionaire.)
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I have all the articles that I reference archived, but I couldn’t put them online without risking a DMCA strike against part of my web-chain within American jurisdiction, like the domain name.
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update:
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Ah, so the company’s dead, then.
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