Pedestrian has inherited Vice senior reporter Gavin Butler and commercial lead Victoria Yelland Riddell, but Mr Rowley said the group planned to invest in the brands and grow separate editorial teams. We think the Vice content, whether its for Vice Australia or for Refinery29, that’s what consumers know and that’s what our advertiser brands know, that’s not a concern for us,” Mr Rowley said when asked about the reputation of Vice Media.
“From our perspective, we really don’t see that as a threat, we have our own internal culture and how we work. Pedestrian isn’t overly concerned about rehabilitating the Vice brand in the local market. It was part of a wider effort to reduce Vice’s global network, after it axed 10 per cent of its global staff in February 2019. In June last year, Vice made global cuts that resulted in the local arm of the business significantly shrinking, closing its Sydney and Melbourne offices and leaving just one editor and writer behind after boasting around 50 staff in its heyday. While the company was valued as high as $US5.7 billion by private equity group TPG in 2017, Disney wrote off its entire Vice stake in 2019, at the time worth $US353 million. Vice had been a competitive presence in the youth publishing space for many years after launching in 2014, and globally had financial backers including WPP and Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.īut cracks appeared in 2018 when co-founder Shane Smith stepped aside after The New York Times published an investigation into sexual misconduct across the company and reports Vice missed its annual revenue target by $US100 million. ”Having those different voices means we can approach different briefs from different brands in ways that we couldn’t with our other titles – that’s where it’s opening up the opportunity,” he said. With an audience overlap of 7.76 per cent, the partners hope the deal will be a boon for advertisers wanting both a mass youth audience and the ability to reach niche interest groups. The addition of the new titles will boost Pedestrian’s total audience figure, which was 4.16 million in December according to Nielsen, while Vice reaches 1.18 million. “We’re setting this up for long-term, we don’t see it as being a one- or two-year thing,” Mr Rowley said. Mr Rowley would not comment on how long the deal is for, or how much Pedestrian paid for the license, but pointed to the group’s existing relationships with other licensing partners which have gone for more than a decade. Refinery29 will fill Pedestrian’s female-focused gap after the group, which publishes Pedestrian.TV, Business Insider and Gizmodo, ended its licensing agreement with Popsugar in January. Vice’s local head Myki Slonim said the partnership offered Vice a new way to grow its brand in Australia, while Vice will add video prowess to the group. Pedestrian Group CEO Matt Rowley says Facebook turning off news was not a “game over” impact on the group’s traffic. Pedestrian Group chief executive Matt Rowley said Pedestrian.TV, a past competitor to Vice, rejected suggestions the brands might cannibalise each other’s audiences. The deal will boost Pedestrian’s audience by over a million and hopefully enable the group to attract more advertisers as it works to be become less reliant on audience traffic from Facebook, whose recent news ban sent traffic to youth publishers tumbling.
#Vice media owner crack
Youth focused Vice Media is having a second crack at the Australian market, inking a deal with Nine’s Pedestrian Group to publish Vice Australia and female-focused platform Refinery29.
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