Vice.com

» see vice.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i read vice on and off through the 2010s as part of the english-language internet diet. honestly, it was the news site that ran like a magazine, the crowd it was made for was anglo and twenty-something. i was on the edge of that crowd. some of the longform pieces were good. the noisey vertical for music had a real point of view and motherboard had useful tech reporting. for whatever reason, the brand itself i could never quite trust, the aesthetics were doing too much work.

vice started as a montreal punk zine in 1994, founded by shane smith and suroosh alvi out of a community newspaper. the company moved to new york in 1999, the print magazine kept running through the 2000s as a free-distribution street paper while the digital side was built out under viceland.com and a video product at vbs.tv. by 2011 those two domains were consolidated into vice.com as the flagship.

the 2010s were the bet years. shane smith pitched vice as the millennial news brand that would replace traditional cable journalism. rupert murdoch put 70 million dollars in. disney invested 200 million. by 2017 softbank and tpg cash plus hbo carriage deals had pushed the valuation to 5.7 billion dollars. the staff count hit somewhere over 3000. anyway, vice news daily on hbo was the marquee product, the longform digital pieces fed the editorial pipeline.

the unwinding started around 2018. the digital advertising market collapsed for editorial-led publishers as programmatic ad spend consolidated under google and meta. vice had four rounds of layoffs between 2019 and 2022. in fairness, almost every digital-native publisher of vice's vintage went through the same arc (mic, mashable, buzzfeed news, vox). in may 2023 vice media group filed chapter 11. the fortress investment group consortium acquired the assets for 225 million dollars in a credit bid that june.

fortress did not want to run a news site. on february 22 2024 ceo bruce dixon told staff vice.com would stop publishing, several hundred people lost their jobs in the same call. the site was kept online as an archive but no new articles would be posted. the brand pivoted to a quarterly print magazine relaunched in september 2024 chasing a 20000-subscriber target. honestly, the flagship news site that defined vice for thirteen years was over.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

shane smith was the public face. loud at davos in a fur coat was one of the press photo motifs. the pitch to investors was that vice was the only media brand that millennials trusted, that it could scale the way mtv had scaled in the 80s. for a few years between 2014 and 2017 the numbers carried the pitch. carriage deals with hbo plus an a&e network channel rebrand as viceland, alongside an international expansion that put vice offices in 35 cities.

the editorial culture had a real signature. immersive video documentaries in north korea and inside the islamic state. the noisey music vertical that hired actual critics. motherboard's tech reporting that broke real stories. for whatever reason, the same culture also tolerated workplace problems that came out in 2017-2018 lawsuits and reporting, which damaged the brand right when the ad market was turning.

~ what really happened ~

the chapter 11 in may 2023 was not surprising. vice had been burning cash for years, the fortress and soros credit facility holding the company's debt was first in line when the bankruptcy paperwork landed. the asset auction in june 2023 closed at 225 million dollars on the credit bid. nothing else cleared a higher offer.

fortress kept the brand and the studio business that licensed content to external buyers. it shed the news site. anyway, bruce dixon's february 22 2024 announcement was the cleanly-dead moment for vice.com as a publishing operation. the existing url stayed live as an archive but the editorial team had been dismantled.

~ what it became ~

vice media group still exists in 2026 as a holding company that owns the brand alongside the back catalog and the print magazine. the print mag launched september 2024 as a quarterly, paid subscription model targeting 20000 subs in the first year. the studio business licenses old vice video content to streamers.

the news site archive remains accessible at vice.com but it is frozen. nothing has been added since february 2024. the noisey vertical is gone alongside motherboard and the longform feature pipeline. what is left is the brand asset and the print product, the same shape vice had in 2003 before the digital bet.

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