Posted on 02/28/2024 7:39:12 PM PST by Rummyfan
The company did things that might have sent a guy called Trump to jail ... Like paying someone to pretend he was an MTV executive interested in a show to mislead a reporter profiling the company. Or having Vice employees bring friends with laptops to pose as workers.
Vice was accused of using hidden techniques to artificially inflate its audience numbers. According to one of Smith’s former girlfriends, “Shane would talk all the time about how stupid people were for giving them money.” ...
An early, important investor was my ex-boss, Rupert Murdoch, whom Smith reportedly told, “I have Gen Y, I have social, I have online video. You have none of that. I have the future; you have the past.”
It worked. Murdoch invested $70 million in 2013, pushing Vice’s valuation to $1.4 billion.
A few months later, I noticed a problem. At the time, I ran FoxNews.com and was looking to boost our social media presence. Analyzing other media outlets, it became apparent to me that Vice’s Facebook numbers were inflated to the point of nonsense....
Since the boss had just dropped $70 million, I thought I should give him a heads-up. After a meeting, I mentioned what I had found to Rupert, summarizing it as “they’re full of s**t.”
I expected him to be perhaps a tad bit worried, but that wasn’t in Rupert’s DNA. He just chuckled and said, “Of course they’re full of s**t.”
The next year, a venture-capital firm and A&E invested $500 million, raising Vice’s valuation to $2.5 billion. By 2017, another $450 million investment pushed its worth to nearly $6 billion.
Money like that buys a lot of video production, articles, and audience. With it, Vice spawned two feature film studios, a publishing arm, a cable TV channel, and more.
All gone.
(Excerpt) Read more at theblaze.com ...
So this might be a good time to “invest” in Bitcoin?
Actually, that is a joke.
A billionaire (Rupert) occasionally can’t tell what is a solid investment.
I sure don’t have his kind of money to throw around.
Sorta breaks your heart, doesn’t it?
Must have missed them.
Sounds like an iFag phone/social masturbation site thing, so no shock.
Sounds like a classic “pump and dump” scheme.
Reddit will be next. They have announced an IPO. A few years ago they valued the company at $10 billion then a year later it was $5 billion. No current valuation as the IPO details are being worked on. That is a 50% drop. I figure they will be committing stock fraud and give out fake user numbers.
The news article I saw was at Yahoo and the comments were almost all negative towards Reddit. They censor and ban users all the time. Not just a ban but a permanent ban where they track your pc or cell phone if you create another account and log in.
You cannot have a successful business doing that.
The owners will become rich, the company will decline and the investors will lose lots of money and like Vice and many others will disappear.
Reddit lost almost all their conservative users when they banned r/The_Donald in 2020. That user base is still going strong today at https://patriots.win/
So essentially they threw away a huge clientele.
I post memes and links from PDW here all the time.
The only people reddit bans or censors are conservatives. just the thought of saying “ a man cant give birth is akin to poking a hole inside a volcano. You will quickly realize that was a bad idea on that site.
8 & 9: I see that Reddit on X hardly has any posts.
https://twitter.com/Reddit
Reddit hasn’t turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but it just filed to go public anyway
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/23/tech/reddit-ipo-filing-business-plan/index.html
Cannot make money son they commit stock fraud like facebook and twitter when they first came out. Google was caught placing advertisers ads on ad farms where hardly no one would see. When caught their response was to discount future ads....
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