BuzzFeed, Vice woes signal crisis in digital-only media

"There's a lot of middle ground content in the digital world that doesn't have a lot of value. And I think that's the kind of stuff that's going to disappear."

VICE has some good, real investigative reportage.

The fact is listicles and sponsored content and manufactured outrage opinion pieces are being written by LLM.

The Hunter Thompson-esque reporting done sometimes at VICE and by people such as Chris Hedges will not be automated in the near term. The white collar job market is going through a big crunch and I wonder what the the elected officials will do about it.

Haha the far-left progressive so called news are failing because no one believes their nonsense anymore. Marxist propaganda

Case in point opinion piece generated by a Gen .01 chatbot.

Both companies spent too much money - more than they needed to. Just because you have VC doesn't mean you can lose money endlessly. You have to make a profit eventually or you aren't a business, you are a charity spending other peoples' money. When they established value, they failed to invest it outside their core business, to build a more stable asset portfolio.

Advertising revenue is still there, and will be enough to support companies that run tighter ships. The model is still valid. Advertisers are just more savvy, exploiting other, newer, cheaper avenues, more directly. TikTok until it is banned, and then they will move on to another.

Free is now the default, combined with pro/premium for cash. That is what Musk is trying to do at Twitter, but other issues tend to dominate there.

Switching to subscriptions and paywalls is not an option - that is a quicker way to go bust than spending too much.

This sector evolves quickly, perhaps too quickly for the traditional VC-to-IPO process. Investors are wising up and being more sensible with their cash.

If the US banks start to make like dominoes, rich people will need to park their loot somewhere. Not crypto. Nothing sanctioned or about to be by Uncle Sam. Maybe gold, rare earth metals and the arms trade. There is a still a lot of cash out there for VC, but they will want a more realistic business plan behind it and more cautious use of their money.

Haha the far-left progressive so called news are failing because no one believes their nonsense anymore. Marxist propaganda

Anything that is not catering to the extreme right is marxist leftist, to those that need to be spoon fed their information.

Foxnews lose to MSNBC Ha Ha

They may have started off more middle of the road but both of these started pumping out too much left/woke BS pieces & are reaping what they have sewn, low quality, no balance of opinions.

We see the same now happening with Fox on the right, admittedly a bit different but basically a similar thing playing out.

On one side the model being unsuccessful is a negative development, because it changed a lot in the way that news were distributed and diluted a little the monopoly some companies had. But on the other hand both Vice and Buzzfeed relied a lot on low quality reporting and riding negative trends to get profits easily, so their crisis can also be seen as something positive.