![]() ![]() SPAC in January former AT&T Broadband and YES Network chief Leo J. Dish chairman Charlie Ergen launched a $1 billion SPAC (CONX Corp.) in October that has since l owered that amount to about $750 million John Malone’s Liberty Media closed the $ 575 million Liberty Acquisition Corp. and 135 million globally.įormer and current media executives have hopped on the SPAC bandwagon recently. On its own website, Vice says its digital properties attract about 50.4 million unique visitors per month in the U.S. In contrast, SimilarWeb ranked 29th among news sites with 125.24 million total visits in February. Vice Media’s websites don’t appear to be growing that much.Īccording to web analytics company SimilarWeb, ranks 101st among news sites and averaged about 30.29 million total visits in February. Vice Studios has produced films like The Report, starring Adam Driver and Annette Bening Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum and Netflix docu-series 1994. Its biggest business is in digital media, with websites like Munchies, Motherboard, Noisey, i-D and Garage. The main reason, some SPAC executives say, is that consolidation in the industry has already taken place.īut Vice Media isn’t just TV. While there have been some SPAC programming investments - notably Software Acquisition Corp.’s purchase of CuriosityStream last year - they have generally steered clear of television. SPACs have the money - according to SPAC Insider, 270 SPACs have been created this year raising $88 billion - to invest in the media space, but not necessarily the stomach.Īlso Read: SPACs: The (New) Final Frontier This year, with the surge in SPAC offerings looking to put their money somewhere, anywhere, in the media space, Vice has attracted some attention. That gave Vice some breathing room, as it moves toward profitability. ![]() Talk of an IPO first surfaced in 2019, and Dubuc reportedly renegotiated the terms of the TPG investment - replacing stock and cash dividend payments to the PE firm with preferred equity awards. Seasoned programming executive Nancy Dubuc took the helm of Vice in 2018 and has been looking for a way to make its anxious investors whole for years. But the write-off still was a smudge on Vice’s once bright veneer. Now, Disney’s write-down doesn’t man that Vice Media is worth nothing, just that Disney doesn’t believe it will ever get its money back. Disney effectively owns a 24% interest in Vice (14% fully diluted), that it deems essentially worthless. The rest of its programming lineup is a mix of “edgy” programming like F*ck That’s Delicious, Gaycation and Balls Deep, as well as reruns of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.īut signs that the wheels were falling off the Vice Media gravy train were apparent as early as in 2018, when Disney, which invested $400 million in Vice Media in 2014, took a $157 million impairment to that stake in 2018 and another $353 million impairment in 2019.Īccording to its last 10-K annual report, filed in November. Its most-watched show is Dark Side of the Ring, a wrestling docu-series that averages under 400,000 live-plus-three viewers in the coveted 18-49 year old age bracket. Viceland, the network that took the place of H2, the network even History Channel forgot, rebranded as Vice TV last year and has continued to have middling ratings. That was nearly twice the market cap of AMC Networks - home of the most watched program on cable at the time The Walking Dead - for a media company that was ready, by its own admission, to take the cable business by storm. Vice grabbed a lot of headlines in 2017 when private equity fund TPG Capital invested about $450 million in the media company, giving it that eye-popping $5.7 billion valuation. ![]()
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