Wednesday, 1 May 2024

Vice Media reveals more layoffs as coronavirus slams digital operations

Vice Media said Friday it is slashing more jobs as the coronavirus continues to slam ad revenue at its web operations.

The gonzo news gatherer is facing “business challenges,” Chief Executive Nancy Dubuc said in a Friday memo, confirming that the Brooklyn-based company is eliminating 55 positions in the US and 100 jobs internationally, primarily in the struggling digital division.

“Currently, our digital organization accounts for around 50 percent of our headcount costs, but only brings in about 21 percent of our revenue,” the memo said. “Looking at our business holistically, this imbalance needed to be addressed for the long-term health of our company.”

Dubuc said the US-based cuts will take place Friday and the international layoffs will hit in the coming weeks. Aside from the digital division not pulling its weight, Dubuc cited broader challenges that the publishing industry is facing amid the coronavirus crisis.

“Publishing right now is difficult across the whole industry — plain and simple  —  and the pandemic has intensified the tensions we all know exist between publishing and advertising,” she wrote.

While Vice has built its digital business quickly, it isn’t seeing a strong return on investment, as platforms like Facebook and Google are taking the lion’s share of advertising revenue and have formed a monopoly of sorts in digital media, according to Dubuc.

“I worry about the day that I fear is fast approaching, when I wake up and everything I see, touch and know is because a few machines filtered my view by ‘optimizing’ the world around me for the sake of more growth and more revenue,” Dubuc said.

She called for the media industry to “stand together” in the face of “monopolies,” while offering her own newly laid off employees severance pay, their work-issued laptops and job search guidance.

Such cuts have been part of a larger reorganization under Dubuc, who joined the firm in March 2018. In February 2019, the company cut 10 percent of its staff, or about 250 people.

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