Vice Media’s exorbitant valuation reflects a long commitment to creating a good product over cheap shortcuts and flashy audience metrics.
Recently the editor and founder of Pando Daily Sarah Lacey wrote an excellent piece titled Want to understand the secret of Vice’s success? Wait and watch, in which she explains the incredible story of how Vice Media went from a small, local print-based operation to a burgeoning media empire valued at over $2.5 billion. The critical message Lacey touches on really starts with this passage:
Nearly every single investor Pando has has asked me how more money or algorithms can scale our company faster. My answer is always: They can’t. It’s just going to take five to ten years of solid work to build the media company we want to build. There is no shortcut.
Lacey goes on to delineate the virtue of patience in building a media company. In the interesting case of Vice, she reasons, the company stuck to its vision and gradually constructed a large and prestigious content production company over the course of nearly two decades. The rise of Vice, punctuated by a recent $500 million round of venture funding, was not linear nor strategic. It was a strange and often chaotic journey that led to a larger valuation than that of Buzzfeed, Huffington Post or any of the other hot-name players in the category. In Lacey’s words, the key to Vice’s success was to “wait and watch.”
While this is an insightful assessment, there is something even stronger at play here than “patience.” The real message to be taken from Vice’s amazing story, in this commentator’s humble opinion, is how dedication to a quality editorial product overcomes trickery, shortcuts, salesmanship, flash-in-the-pan audience building tactics, traffic acquisition, social/search optimization, political ideology or pandering, celebrity endorsements, slick commercials and any number of other illusory “strategies” that buoy short-term valuations of media companies.
While I cannot call myself a loyal reader and consumer of Vice content, I am familiar with the company’s work and have been for more than 10 years. In all that time, I have consistently come across refreshing stories, intrepid reporting, solid writing, high video production value and, above all, originality in the products offered by Vice. The magazine’s infamous “Dos and Don’ts” columns were a particular favorite of mine in the early 2000s. And its investigative video journals in Africa and Latin America have inspired my own travels in a number of ways. This kind of content resonates much stronger than what you commonly see showing up in a Google search or in your Facebook feed.
In other words, take note creators, writers and producers of the world. The most important thing you have is commitment to producing quality material and not compromising your mission, which in Vice’s case is kind of a mainstream gonzo journalism effort. Not to say there haven’t been savvy business tactics employed by the Vice leadership team or forays into “lipstick on a pig” endeavors along the way. But the one constant is the finished product. You see that in every issue of the magazine and every video segment on HBO.
In a way, Vice may have more in common with the Apple of Steve Jobs than any of the other companies in its media orbit. But the real fun begins now. How a company operates when it’s scrappy and underestimated might be a little different than when it goes to bed every night with Fox, Disney and Hearst.
Photo by Ernest Brillo on Unsplash.