YPO Global Digital Summit — NYC
Because of my work here at not vice, I was invited to talk about “just how much bullshit exists” in new media and got to tell a group of CEOs just how awful Shane Smith is. It was a lot of fun.
Dave Kelly on behalf of Young Presidents’ Organisation interviewed me. Watch it on Vimeo or read it below.
Corrections: I have made several small corrections in the text below which have been indicated with [square brackets]. Corrections of substance are indicated with “correction:”.
YPO: Before we talk about [Shane Smith] Tell me about you. How did you get started in following this story?
Daniel Voshart: A friend wanted to make a parody of the Vice HBO series. He said ‘this show, it’s really interesting but really sensational — I want to play off of that.’ His pitch was ‘we’re going to pretend the CN Tower is falling over […] and everyone’s worried about it’.
Before the interviews we'd go up to the person and say ‘We’re just going to bullshit you. Play along with this.’ and they would be like ‘yeah sure’ *laughter* Like, everyone was totally cool with that. *laughter*
Audience member: “YOU’RE CANADIAN” *laughter*
DV:[…] It reaffirmed what we knew which is that they were just able to inject themselves… and manipulate facts to create a more interesting storyline.
As a result of making [the parody: Vice Canada] reached out to the producer and wanted us to come in for job interviews. Vice offered me a job [interview] I told the filmmakers ‘I gotta go to this interview dressed as a clown. This company is just a joke.’ And so…
YPO: So you went [to the job interview]?
DV: Uh, Later. Later I went but y’know. They were like ‘please don’t go dressed as a clown.’ *laughter*
I was leaving the film industry. I was moving into VR and I was like ‘I gotta burn these bridges — burn everything’ *laughter* and they’re like ‘no-no-no’ they are quite accomplished filmmakers and they probably did the right thing.
Eventually I went to the job interview and said ‘I’m writing a book about your company, tell me about this company’. The book sorta morphed back into a blog.
YPO: What did you find out [in blogging about Vice]?
DV: That Vice is a great company to — analyse. It’s the canary in the coal mine of everything that’s wrong with journalism — everything. I guess I’d like to say it’s a marketer’s dream. That [corporations can inject] whatever you want into whatever … In the NY Times you can’t say ‘mention Clorox Bleach in a story’ but Vice will find a way to do that and sell it on their social media accounts.
I would say that [selling their news feed to advertisers] is good for marketers but I think they are also heavy users of botting. Clicking their own content and coming up with fake…
YPO: numbers…
DV: [Fake] numbers. They use the traffic reassignment thing with ComScore to absurd degrees. If you think you’re advertising on Vice you might actually [have been seeing traffic from] people making food videos for a company called Render Media — which [did] half their impressions — which you’ve never heard of. I’ve never heard of and if you go to the Render Media website it’s just a series of these bizarre [videos] that go viral on Facebook but have none of the Vice brand. But that’s what you’re paying for.
YPO: Tell us about this guy *points to Image of Shane Smith* give us the basic story of Vice.
DV: Okay so Shane Smith… is a gross human being. *laughter*
Sorry, I haven’t been sandpapered from interviews this is my first interview about Vice (excluding a sound bite for E-Talk Canada). Shane Smith is the CEO of Vice Media. It was him and two other founders Suroosh Alvi and Gavin McInnes. Gavin McInnes is sort-of the Alt-Right (now Alt-Lite) person who left the company — he left in 2008 — because he had this strong conservative voice and was writing for a conservative magazine [on the side] and eventually was pushed out. Paid to leave the company.
Shane Smith is the carnival barker of Vice Media. If there’s a number to say about the company he’ll just sorta amplify it. It tends to be four to ten times of what the number actually is *laughter* If you can actually fact-check it. And it’s hard to find because they do close off their numbers.
The real point where I was like ‘this guy is completely full of shit’ he said ‘our proprietary video player gets twice as many views as YouTube’s and I was like ‘that’s fishy because your proprietary player is garbage *laughter* and uh ‘hows that possible?’. So you can check how many times a link was shared on Facebook. I did an analysis on their [correction: top 20 videos] and, on average, it was shared [1/20th] the amount of times as the YouTube link. So he’s saying it’s getting twice as much but it’s getting shared 1/50th [of what it should be]. And he also said that, I think, half his views came from Facebook — so it’s impossible [for both to be true]. He just makes it up.
NOTE: During a 2013 Keynote, Tom Freston asked Shane Smith about video traffic: “Shane: ‘Click Print Gun’ did really well for us. […] Tom: how many views does that have so far? Shane: On YouTube I think its 6 million. […] On our sites it’s about 12 [million].” According to Facebook share debugger YouTube link to Click Print Gun had 220,093 shares while their own site had 111.
YPO: You have a website for your blog now called…
DV: Yeah, so the book was originally called Fork Vice — similar to another word — and the blog is Not Vice dot com.
YPO: So I assume at some point you got their attention?
DV: So I had been emailing them several times to get comment. They have spokespeople, communications person but like everyone… ‘I’m writing a book about your company, I’m committing months to this, nothing I hear nothing. The only way to communicate is with individual employees or if you publicly shame them on Twitter you might get a response. If you’re coss-hashtagging someone.
Shane Smith has blocked me on Twitter. [Shane] keeps saying they used to be called Voice of Montreal ‘they dropped the ‘O’ and turned it into VICE’. [I tweeted] ‘why don’t you just drop all the letters and go out of business?’ *laughter* and so he blocked me on Twitter for that. *laughter* This was after many polite communications.
I did eventually go to the Vice Canada office when things mutated from ‘you do bad journalism’ to ‘your company is probably committing fraud’. I went to the Vice Canada office and it eventually led to the police *laughter* coming to my house.
YPO: So do you think they’re annoyed with you because you’re annoying? *laughter* Or because you’re pointing out truth that they don’t want people to know?
DV: I probably am an annoying person *laughter*
YPO: Right but you know what I’m saying *laughter*
DV: Yeah, yeah. They certainly don’t want to recognize anything that I’m saying. Nobody has officially said…
YPO: “Stop”
DV: ‘Stop doing this’. They have said ‘don’t come to the Vice Canada office and make employees fear for their safety’ and there’s a long story behind that and there’s a blog about it. Basically, when I came in they were like ‘are you going to bomb the place?’ and I said ‘yes’. *laughter*. They said ‘ha-ha’ and said ‘bomb us with knowledge?’ and I said ‘well yeah, pretty much’ and I was like ‘this isn’t a story pitch. I have questions about your CEO. He’s made up this history. He was not from poverty. His mom works in legal, his dad was an engineer, he went to one of the top rated high schools in Canada and he said that he was a coke dealer and his co-founder said that he never dealt coke.’
[Shane Smith] was just a rich kid. He said that he graduated from three different programs. He’s the type of person where if the NY Times prints something and they get the facts wrong he’ll just run with that. And will be like ‘the New York Times said it’. He just makes myths into reality.
YPO: And so this is a 4 billion dollar company. This is not a small — this is a big company.
DV: It’s a massive company. I can’t quite tell if their [employee numbers] are correct. They keep saying that they are in 16 countries, 32 countries, I think the latest one is we’re in 70 countries. On the masthead they have the addresses of some of these places [so I looked] them up on Google. [I found residential homes] they don’t have Vice branding outside the offices. Probably [Vice just has] a contributor [and claims an office].
[An earlier speaker] Sarah Fisher said that ‘when you go into the IPO you have to trust the company’. I was just laughing to myself. This company has been trying to do an IPO since 2002. Of course you won’t hear that in their PR. They’ll say ‘this year we’re going to do an IPO’.
They’ve always been trying to do an IPO. My best guess is they won’t give access to the books or they aren’t cooked well enough *laughter*. They’ll just never do an IPO. If they ever do I’ll watch that trash-fire burn. *laughter*
NOTE: 15 years of Vice IPO talk
- 2002: “Let’s talk about your experience with IPOmania…” Vice Rising: Corporate Media Woos Magazine World’s Punks (NYPress Oct 2002)
- 2014: Digital Video Ads and the Viability of a Vice Media IPO (Bloomberg March 2014)(Also on: Forbes)
- 2015: Shane Smith on possible IPO: Vice has met with ‘all the big banks’ (PageSix June 2015)(Also on: Dealbreaker)
- 2017: Vice Media Said to Be Raising More Cash as Prelude to Possible IPO (Fortune May 2017) (Also on: TechCrunch, CNBC, Dealbreaker)
YPO: And you can all say ‘we were talking to a guy. We saw it happening’.
There is a line and I’m sure [members have] experienced it in Silicon Valley. There’s a certain amount of bravado that everybody needs to have. If you’re going to say ‘invest in me — I’m a great company’ you have to say it and believe it as much as you can. But you’re throwing around words like ‘fraud’ which is a little bit different than ‘bravado’. Where is the line-crossing do you think?
DV: I started keeping track of every single number that Shane Smith said. A massive document and anytime he said a number — these are things you can verify — I plot them out over time and it’s everywhere. And the thing about video views on YouTube it just keeps adding up [to fraud] and it never checks out. Never checks out. He told Stephen Colbert ‘we reach 200 million’ — he’ll use words like ‘reach’… does Vice actually reach? Is it these food videos? Are they repeated impressions? He will just mutate words into… you’ll hear one thing but it will always mean the absolute flimsiest version plus 200%. So that’s what I mean by fraud.
Using the word fraud in a written space… this is why it became a blog because I found I would go to a different news organization they would [say] ‘This is a great story. The police came to your house because you’re asking about fraud. We want you to write this.’ But I’ll want to use the word “fraud” in the story and they’ll be like ‘oh our lawyers… we don’t want to get sued by Vice. We don’t want to get sued by Vice’
I looked up litigation law and the only way that I can use these words — I can’t get someone else to publish it — so I put it on a blog and just say ‘screw it. This is just a side project.’ *laughter*
YPO: I just find…
DV: I use the word that accurately describes it and I think that’s “fraud”
YPO: How do you think Disney — so you’re a guy, you’re pretty careful about what you do. I get the feeling that Disney is pretty careful about what they do. But somehow they are in on it now.
DV: Well people with lots of money make gut decisions and I think a good example is Rupert Murdoch. He was an early investor [in Vice], he used to have 5% (now less than 3%) but he also invested in that blood testing company *audience shouts “Theranos”*. Theranos. Yeah, that was just a bunch of bullshit. *laughter* Yeah, and that was a blood testing company.
[Shane Smith is] a guy who’s dad [lost money on] insider trading, Vice’s first investor [Richard Swalinski] had to settle for 11 million for insider trading. [Shane’s] upbringing and the people he surrounds himself with are into insider trading.
The idea that this company is going to do an IPO and that it’s going to be good for the public from a company called ‘Vice’ is just hilarious *laughter*.
YPO: I just love the fact that you’ve made this your mission. You’re saying ‘I’m going to keep digging at this’.
Just before we go, what are some of the things that have really surprised you. The YouTube story is one what else has Vice done of the CEO done or whoever that just made you go ‘oh come on’
DV: Well the VICELAND channel. The one that they are launching that just replaced H2… as soon as it launched the audience got cut in half and now they are saying they have had constant growth but the Nielsen numbers -and I’ve only seen the early ones- there was only a steady decline in audience numbers. They said that they sold out all their ad inventory but I’ve had a Vice insider who would have this information and says that they’ve only sold 15%. So now I see this PR coming out ‘we have shorter ad blocks and its increasing engagement’ and it’s this PR story [when the accurate description] is that you haven’t sold the ads that you’re supposed to sell on a normal TV channel. And you’re telling people they are all sold out and people don’t know they are available to buy. I don’t know what [Vice] is doing but I’m told that it’s bleeding cash.
And [Sarah Fisher] this morning mentioned news sites and she did… she threw Vice in the mix of [news companies worth mentioning] so in the public perception they are seen as legit.
Yeah, it depends on the audience. Yeah, there are some Vice documentaries that I’ve enjoyed and then I’ve fact-checked them and I’ve stopped enjoying *laughter* them after that point.
But yeah, they do hire some legitimate journalists and there are some great people at Vice trying to do great things but it’s the individual. Look at the individual journalist and they probably have a great track record of stuff. You can follow individuals at Vice but not the company.
The next article that I’m writing is that Vice doesn’t issue corrections. So I figure a big bullshitter is going to have hubris -going to be outrageously arrogant- and they will not issue corrections. So I did an analysis of all the major media companies in North America and Vice issued [way] fewer than the second worst which is Fox News. Fox News did like [correction: 0.05%] and Vice was like [correction: 0.03%] of their articles have issued a correction. So either they are perfect journalists — hiring millennials at bottom-barrel rates and not having a fact-checking process, and not having a code of ethics — doing perfect journalism that doesn’t need to be corrected or they are completely full of shit and I’m right.
NOTE: Image from an upcoming research project on news correction frequency. (News corrections vary depending on year. This represents the corrections of articles available online.)
YPO:*laughing* I love this. *laughter* This is so great.
You’re the guy that none of these people want to see knocking on their door *laughter* ‘I got a couple of questions about your company.
Audience Q: I’m curious how much do you think is attributable to the backers MTV [inaudible] Tom Freston, Rupert Murdoch at some stage this seems like a conspiracy… is it already?
DV: It’s hard to start talking with the word ‘conspiracy’ because obviously the first thing I don’t want to labelled by someone is conspiracy theorist.
I think [Tom Freston and Rupert Murdoch’s names] do legitimize the company but it’s interesting to see their backgrounds. You’ve got Rupert Murdoch who a UK court — they invested shortly after the whole Sky scandal of phone dead people’s inboxes — anyways a court said that he’s unfit to run a company then immediately starts investing in Vice. Then you’ve got Tom Freston… MTV is not a journalism company but it is an advertising space — a great space to feed advertising to children.
They make it a good advertising company. They do a lot of side ads which, I imagine, if they do make money it’s on these side deals to make ads for the Olympics… they’ve done cigarette ads — that was a big one.
YPO: Well they are called ‘Vice’
DV: Yeah, and then they will make a documentary about smoking cigarettes in third world countries and they make ads for cigarettes in 3rd world countries? This company is an ethical lobotomy.
Audience Q2: I feel like I’m watching a film noir where the bad guys win at the end *laughter* and people were sort-of mumbling back here and there’s obviously a corollary here between [Shane] Smith and what we are hearing from our post-truth president. So the idea is essentially that you can lie with enough impunity and it advances your career.
DV: You can lie with a beer in your hand and that’s a bit of a legal loophole. And that’s most his interviews and you’ll read in the articles was ‘he was drinking heavily during this’. He’s always building in this plausible deniability *laughter* of ‘well I was drunk in that interview’
Audience Q2 CONT’D: I guess my question is… what do you think the solution is? You’re one person trying [inaudible] against him but what do we do as a society to prevent people from success by denying reality — truth — for their own benefit.
DV: Well the only real way is the old-school style of journalism is fact-checking and having a code of ethics. If you like a certain media company just [type into Google] ‘That Media Company’ and the word “code of ethics” or “journalism standards” or “Style Guide” [to see if] they have that kind of thing. Even Buzzfeed — I have a lot more respect for than Vice. Just look for the basic mechanisms that generate truth — a code of ethics being one of them — and then follow that and give your money to that organisation. I think the only way is to starve companies like Vice from your money and your ad dollars until it goes away.
END
YPO: I think we’re going to starve them by giving them 4 billion and that’s all. Really slow things down.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL VOSHART is available to do awkward interviews about the ethically vacuous company known as Vice Media. Follow him on Twitter.
ABOUT NOT VICE
