I used to love vice's provocative and borderline offensive articles. The french version had that satiric and extremely spicy "war of classes" vibe some other french publications such as charlie hebo had and it was a delight. (cf this one if you can translate it: https://www.vice.com/fr/article/avbv55/le-guide-vice-pour-pe...)
However for the past 10 years I go see their home page once a year and I physically cringe and how boring / washed up all the articles are. I don't think there is a better example of go woke go broke if the story is true.
Are right people not interested in Liberian cannibal warlord or north Korea?
I'll bite. Why is it too much? This sum could be spent on purchasing smaller, struggling media companies covering various niches, or companies unrelated to media, to bootstrap a conglomerate.
But media margins are thin, and any media company will find it hard to make enough profit to justify a valuation above $5.7 billion...the few exceptions are the ones that take decades to grow so big, e.g., Fox Corp and Disney...the conglomerates as you said but this takes a long time to build, longer than VCs can wait for their returns.
Vice made $600 million in revenue in 2018 and earned no profit [1]. If it hit the public markets with those results, its stock will sink into oblivion. Tech companies get high valuations even without profitability because the software business is high margin and investors have hope that they'll become profitable in the future. It's not the same for media companies...the industry outlook is bleak, so there's no greater fool to sell to.
1- https://www.axios.com/2023/05/02/vice-media-preparing-bankru...
I don't know what the going rate is these days but I recall numbers like $0.2 – $2.5 per 1,000 views. Meaning you need to get, and maintain, lots and lots of clicks. Which means lowest common denominator clickbate, while simultaneously not being too edgy and scaring off advertisers. And it's a deep, busy market, so you've got tons of competition, too.
So throwing $1B at it is kind of overkill; it'll be ages before you ever get it back, and it locks you into a race-to-the-bottom market that's incredibly fickle. You coulda put that into a tech startup, or S&P 500 index fund, etc. for less risk and less BS.
Vice Media has several issues;
1) The founder, Shane Smith, was over ambitious and raised over $1 billion, which is just too much for a media firm. This is not a software business with high margins to justify such capital.
2) Vice transformed from an edgy content company producing cool stuff like a documentary about the Liberian cannibal warlord and a trip to North Korean labor camp and became just another mainstream liberal/left-leaning news outlet; the problem is there’s no shortage of such outlets, so Vice lost what made it unique.
The good thing about the kind of edgy content Vice produced is that it cut across all political spectrums and across different countries, meaning a larger audience. Anecdote is I and my friends (from Nigeria) used to watch Vice shows but have stopped due to shoving US politics down our throats.
What will likely happen is that Vice will end up selling for scraps. But note that Shane Smith already sold $100 million+ worth of shares [1], so he’ll be fine regardless.
1- https://www.semafor.com/article/03/19/2023/shane-smith-made-...