VICE

Creator · Verified

Global media company known for edgy documentaries, investigative reporting, and youth-culture coverage.

#19Hub rank

19.2MYouTube followers

About VICE

VICE is counterculture media's defining brand — and its defining cautionary tale. Born in 1994 as a free punk magazine in Montreal, it grew into a global media empire valued at $5.7 billion at its peak, won Emmys for immersive journalism, and then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023. No other media company in the digital age rose higher, fell harder, or taught the industry more.

The origin story is pure indie mythology. In October 1994, Alix Laurent of Interimages Communications founded a magazine called Voice — later Voices of Montreal — with Suroosh Alvi as editor and Gavin McInnes as assistant editor; Shane Smith joined the staff soon after. It covered drug culture, skateboarding, art, music, and trends for Montreal's alternative scene, competing with the established Montreal Mirror. In 1996, Alvi, McInnes, and Smith bought out the publisher and renamed it VICE. A $4 million investment from Canadian investor Richard Szalwinski fueled the move to New York City in 1999, and by 2001 the founders had bought the company back and set up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

What VICE invented was a voice. The house style was irreverent, first-person, and immersive — reporters who embedded themselves in the story instead of observing it. While legacy outlets covered conflict zones from hotel rooftops, VICE's correspondents went to the front lines; while lifestyle magazines curated taste, VICE went looking for the underground scenes nobody else would touch. That voice scaled beautifully to video, and VICE's documentaries became its signature: raw, unfiltered dispatches from places and subcultures the cameras didn't usually go.

The 2010s were the empire years. A $70 million investment from Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox in 2013 valued the company at $1.4 billion; Disney put in $400 million in 2015; private equity firm TPG added $450 million in 2017, pushing the valuation to a staggering $5.7 billion. The money bought scale: multiple websites and verticals, a record label, an ad agency, a film production studio — and prestige television. The Emmy-winning weekly documentary series VICE premiered on HBO in April 2013, with Smith, Alvi, and a rotating cast of correspondents tackling global issues. Its spinoff, Vice News Tonight, premiered October 10, 2016, offering a nightly roundup of news, technology, environment, economics, and pop culture with no traditional anchors.

But the same velocity that built the empire broke it. The company that thrived with a few hundred journalists struggled at 3,000 employees — as one former executive put it, "at some point, what got you there isn't what you are." The Facebook traffic firehose that had fed digital media dried up. HBO ended its seven-year partnership in June 2019, canceling Vice News Tonight. Layoffs came in waves. In April 2023, VICE restructured and downsized its news division; a month later, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and agreed to be acquired by a consortium led by Fortress Investment Group. In February 2024, CEO Bruce Dixon announced more layoffs and that vice.com would cease publishing content.

The story didn't end there. VICE resumed publishing new content in July 2025 and has since partnered with other media companies, including Savage Ventures, to distribute its work. The brand that refused to die keeps finding new forms.

The VICE method, at its best, produced journalism nobody else was doing. Its correspondents reported from inside Liberia's civil war, from North Korea, from the front lines of conflicts and drug wars that legacy outlets covered from a distance — always in the first person, always with the camera uncomfortably close to the action. The weekly HBO series turned that approach into appointment television: immersive, character-driven segments on global issues that won Emmys and forced bigger newsrooms to take the style seriously.

The television footprint went beyond HBO. In 2016, VICE took over the H2 channel and relaunched it as Viceland, a full cable network carrying its sensibility into long-form TV — including the early home of Desus & Mero, the Bronx comedy duo whose late-night talk show became one of the sharpest voices in American comedy before moving to Showtime. The network was another bet that the VICE voice could colonize any medium.

The empire years also carried the seeds of a reckoning with its own culture. A 2017 New York Times investigation documented a "boys' club" atmosphere and a history of sexual misconduct allegations at the company — a stain that complicated the brand's rebel mythology and foreshadowed the broader industry-wide reckoning over workplace culture in media. VICE's response, and the departures that followed, became part of the same story as the financial collapse: a company that had outgrown the garage-band ethos it sold.

Why VICE matters is bigger than any balance sheet. For a generation of readers and viewers, it proved that journalism could be immersive, funny, dangerous, and deeply reported all at once — that you could cover a warlord and a fashion subculture with the same curiosity. It also proved, brutally, that a brilliant voice is not a business model: scale without profitability is a countdown, not a strategy. Every digital media company working today is living in the world VICE built — and trying not to repeat how it ended.