Vice to axe 250 staff in latest round of digital media job losses

Cuts follow recently announced redundancies at HuffPost and BuzzFeed

Vice has announced plans to sack 250 staff, as a wave of job cuts affecting the digital media industry continues to hit companies around the world amid questions over the sustainability of ad-supported online publishing.

Almost every major online news start-up that emerged out of the Facebook-fuelled online publishing boom of the mid-2010s has announced substantial redundancies in the last month, with hundreds of staff sacked at HuffPost, BuzzFeed, and now Vice.

The sites, which boomed thanks to investors hoping they were betting on the future of the media, are having to make substantial cutbacks in a drive for profitability as financial backers grow tired of subsidising losses after investing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Many of the companies have struggled to make news pay and are focusing on other forms of revenue, such as making television shows, selling goods, or producing branded content for companies. Others are erecting paywalls or asking for contributions from readers in a bid to stay afloat and continue to subsidise their loss-making news businesses.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/feb/01/vice-to-axe-250-staff-in-latest-round-of-digital-media-job-losses

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Vice used the announcement to emphasise it is not a digital-only business and has substantial TV production and advertising agency businesses – a sign that being a traditional media business with regular revenue could now be more attractive to investors than an online start-up.

The British online women’s magazine The Pool collapsed into administration on Friday, while once-successful US publishers such as Mic collapsed at the end of last year, citing changes to Facebook’s algorithm that hit their business model.

On Thursday, Facebook announced it had made record profits of $6.8bn in the last three months.


I find it ironic that Facebook made 6.8 billion, and then went into congressional hearings trying to explain their algorithms on what they did with Russian trolls buying ads into their platform and giving answers that were really BS.
And then it was reported that Facebook was trying to censor some news platforms and some justice reporters on some of those platforms.........................call me a cynic, but I don't like Facebook