18M YouTube subscribers can sustain a decent business, sure, but not one with 3000+ employees.

What? Why on earth does Vice have 3000 employees? I thought publishing companies long since switched to having all their content creators freelance.

Edit: I thought OP was exaggerating, but nope, per this random website they have/had at least 2,300.

https://rocketreach.co/vice-media-profile_b5c6f6cef42e0cd9

Vice Media Group is a conglomerate with a bunch of other stuff besides the magazine/website. An ad agency [1], a tv/film studio [2], another film studio [3], etc. It seems like they’ll be keeping a lot of that too. The linked message implies they’re shutting down the ad-supported journalism part of the company and doubling down on contract work.

[1] https://www.virtueworldwide.com/

[2] https://studios.vice.com/

[3] https://www.pulsefilms.com/

I assume it was that high to get more funding? like a VC startup style? no other reason make sense

That alone explains what’s happening.

When the real owners of this country pick you as their propaganda darling.. you get to hire all their useless cousins, nieces/nephews and their college friends with hunanities degrees. See twitter.

There are many labels I could apply to Vice, but I'm reasonable sure "propaganda darling" of the "real owners of this country" would not be near the top. Were you thinking of Fox or New York Times or something?

Subscriber counts don't decline, with how old youtube is now, and how little competition there was back in the day, you can have a long running channel (like vice's) with very little active viewership. How are the views on their recent videos?

Looks like they're regularly 100k-500k views with a few outliers every few months in the millions and a couple of times a year hitting 5M. I have no idea how this translates to income.

just anecdotally, among the youtubers i follow those seems like view counts which would allow a solo creator to quit their day job and hire a part-time editor.

I'm beginning to see the issue. That's 1,5 employees covered by the youtube money, now for the remaining 2998,5...

As someone who has never even tried to monetize youtube, I am shocked that having that sized audience still can't make a go at it as a FT job. Guess I will stick to programming.

I suppose this is why most of the big channels are very upfront about how their bread is buttered by Patreon and merch far more so than youtube adbux.

"However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously. Moving forward, we will look to partner with established media companies to distribute our digital content, including news, on their global platforms, as we fully transition to a studio model."

YouTube payouts have hit rock bottom lately - which has, notably, been part of the reason for so many creator retirements.

Ironic, considering the ad blocker ban was supposed to fix this.

Once YouTube started monetizing videos that weren't in the partner program it was always going to be downhill from there. The supply of ad-eligible videos probably doubled overnight

18,000,000 subs,but how many of those are willing to pay for the news they receive?

Even if that's a mere 0.1% willing to pay a dollar per year, that's still enough to pay a few freelancers

Actually, its only $18,000 a year (18,000,000 * 0.001).

The would have to charge a lot more than that to pay anyone anything.

A thousand dollars a month pays for quite some freelance gigs though.

The Upwork/fiverrr economy is brutal.

Also, go ask a freelance writer how much they make. Or the girl in your coffeeshop or the guy behind the bar. There are many jobs that pay peanuts in Europe or America.