Pivot to Video is the New Learn to Code
“Pivot to video” has officially been declared Hate Speech.
Vice Media is a blog. That is all that it is or ever was. However, it was a pretty sweet gig you could get a job writing for what is, and always has been, just a blog. A six-figure salary plus benefits to do this:
Although, it turns out that Vice has an app that does that and I’m not kidding.
But it appears that the gravy train has inevitably run out of coal. Layoffs have begun as the company “pivots to video.” And if you can’t work in video, you are out of a very cushy job.
“In a letter sent to top executives, including Vice CEO Nancy Dubuc, this week, the committee demanded that the media company increase its severance from 6 to 8 weeks to 9 to 12 weeks for each former staffer, depending on the length of their employment, and pay out the former employees’ unused paid time off — provisions that the union committee said were given to U.S. staffers during Vice’s previous round of layoffs in May of 2020.”
“’VICE willingly met these terms last year, during the peak of the pandemic, while the advertising industry and VICE’s own revenue were cratering,’ the letter said. “It’s unconscionable that the company will not meet these same terms while the pandemic is still raging and federal unemployment benefits are no longer available — but VICE’s business has recovered and is doing better than ever, according to your own assessment in company-wide emails from Nancy [Dubuc] and [Chief Digital Officer] Cory [Haik] respectively.”
“The committee also took issue with the optics of Vice receiving $135 million in new funding a week after the layoffs were announced…”
It’s the last part that had me laughing. “If you have $135 million in new venture capital, then you need to spend it on us! Don’t you understand how capitalism works? We have a union damn it!”
Forgive me for stating the obvious but unions protect either skilled labor or hard labor. Anyone who writes for Vice, Buzzfeed, Nerdist or anyone else that grinds out clickbait is nothing more than a monkey banging on a keyboard about how empowering the Muslim Ms. Marvel is. This is not skilled labor.
These people simply cannot foresee the obvious consequences of their own actions.
The fact is this business model was something that was tried out by Silicon Valley VC money in the early to mid-2010s. These blogs were drastically over valued when you consider the fact that their only real source of income was banner ads. That was fine when it started but then Google and Facebook got together and swallowed that entire market. I can theoretically muster sympathy for companies that got wiped out by the techno-oligarchy, but then there was their whole “fuck America” thing.
Regardless, the business model clearly morphed into, “coast on the venture capital as long as possible then figure something out when the money is gone.”
The something turned out to be, “pivoting to video.” That is where the $135 million is supposed to go. Except clickbait writers have no idea how to do that so they are losing their $100k jobs and are discovering that no one else will pay them that kind of money.
Consequently, “pivot to video” is now literally being referred to as Hate Speech.
Okay, I’m done here.
