This story first appeared in the Sept. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
NancyDubuc, JeffBewkes, James Murdoch, Tom Freston and Martin Sorrell are media executives cut from a similar button-down, corporate-culture cloth. So perhaps it is thrilling or titillating for them to meet someone like Vice's Shane Smith, 44, who is all showman and promoter, a media type more reminiscent of the wild old days than the constrained new ones.
In late August, A&E Networks president and CEO Dubuc invested $250 million for a 10 percent interest in Vice, valuing the company at a whopping $2.5 billion (A&E is owned by Hearst and Disney). A tech venture firm, TCV, followed with $250 million for another 10 percent. Bewkes, Time Warner's chairman and CEO, was set to do a deal with Vice at the beginning of the summer that would have valued the company at $2 billion but Vice's valuation rose more quickly than Bewkes' ability to act. Murdoch bought 5 percent for $70 million in 2013 on behalf of 21st Century Fox and got a seat on the board; Sorrell, CEO of WPP, put $25 million in; and Freston, a former Viacom CEO, invested his own money early on and signed up as one of Vice's key advisers. One might be forgiven for thinking of Zero Mostel in The Producers selling a Broadway show many times over.
In theory, these executives are drawn to Smith's purported Pied Piper ability to attract that most sought-after and hard-to-reach (nearly always modified by "hard-to-reach") demographic: distracted young men, more reliably playing video games than consuming traditional media. But they also are drawn to his Pied Piper ability to attract ever-more media executives and the ever-larger multiples they and their colleagues seem willing to pay for a piece of Vice.
Arguably, the latter has been proved out much more completely than the former. These days one can attach many superlatives to Vice it might be the hottest, savviest, coolest, richest, Brooklyn-est (according to Smith, it is the biggest employer in Williamsburg, the epicenter of Brooklyn-ness) new media company on the block but one thing it does not necessarily have is a supersized audience. Vice makes a torrent of YouTube videos, but most, according to YouTube stats, have limited viewership. The New York Times, in its coverage of Vice's TCV deal, seemed eager to believe in Vice and at the same time was perplexed by it, quoting the company's monthly global audience claim of 150 million viewers but, as well, comScore's more official and low-wattage number of 9.3 million monthly unique visitors. BuzzFeed, with an audience many times greater, has been valued at less than a third of Vice's $2.5 billion.
That is, of course, part of Smith's showman appeal. Even with his company's obvious limitations YouTube is an unreliable platform he has boasted of producing a range of superhuman business-model breakthroughs.
It doesn't much matter, for instance, that Vice has low audience numbers because it does not sell the usual CPM-based advertising. Instead, Smith sells high-priced sponsorships marketing the Vice idea, in other words, rather than the Vice numbers. What's more, playing coy, he does not seem to sell advertisers very much, often offering big consumer brands like Anheuser-Busch modest sponsorship credit at the ends of videos.
Then, too, Vice's growing profits come in part because it continues to act like an outsider and pay young workers catch-as-catch-can alternative-media wages, even though it now is a richly funded enterprise.
Another of Vice's accomplishments has been to position itself as a cutting-edge technology company rather than a media company, thereby achieving a techlike valuation. But Vice really has few tech skills beyond Final Cut Pro, running much more by old media seat-of-the-pants instincts and aggressive salesmanship than new digital algorithms. (Vice, with its many fledgling music writers looking for a byline, often is compared inexactly to BuzzFeed, with its ever-growing staff of engineers able to game the social-media world.)
Smith also, counterintuitively, has launched his company into the news business, making it a veritable Zelig of multiple international conflicts. Its tipping-point moment might have been Dennis Rodman's Vice-sponsored embrace of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il and its step into legitimacy with its earnest HBO world-report show. But this is at a moment when it never has been more difficult to monetize news programming. Indeed, so bizarre is the notion that Vice's young-male audience will watch international news that puzzled media minds only can seem to conclude it must be true and another epochal media disruption. (YouTube widely advertises Vice as a type of new-wave 60 Minutes.)
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