Vice Media Receives $ 250 Million in George Soros Debt, Other – Variety



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Vice Media, seeking to revitalize its business in decline, received a $ 250 million injection of funds from a consortium of investments including billionaire George Soros.

The new debt financing of the company was led by 23 Capital, with the participation of Soros Fund Management, Fortress Investment Group and Monroe Capital, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The vice-president, who once held a leading position, missed his revenue targets and laid off about 250 employees, or 10% of his workforce, earlier this year.

Nancy Dubuc, vice-president, hired last year to lead the company's recovery efforts, has set a goal of achieving profitability in the next fiscal year. The former CEO of A + E Networks has restructured the company around five business sectors: Digital, Information, Vice Studios (Film and Television Production), Viceland Cable Channel (a partnership with A + E) and an internal advertising agency. Vertu. "After finalizing the 2019 budget, we are now focused on achieving our goals and achieving our goals," Dubuc wrote in a memo to employees on February 1st.

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The Brooklyn-based youth culture society, created 25 years ago as a punk culture magazine in Montreal, was worth $ 5.7 billion less than two years ago. Since then, his valuation has dropped: Disney announced a $ 157 million write-down of its stake in Vice Equity last year. Vice had previously raised about $ 1.4 billion from investors, including TPG Capital, which invested $ 450 million in the company during the summer of 2017.

This week, Vice Media announced a change of strategy on the digital front to enhance public engagement and advertising: it eliminated separate web "channels" for thematic areas such as Vice News, Noisey and Munchies , incorporating all of its content on vice.com. He presented plans at his Digital Content NewFronts marketing event on Wednesday in New York.

Also at the event, Dom Delport, president of the international vice president of finance and chief revenue officer who joined the company a year ago, said the company would exclude third-party affiliate sites from comScore statistics from Vice Media, starting May 15th. The digital media sector suffered from inconsistent statistics and a lack of transparency in the measurements.

According to Delport, according to the company's calculations, Vice has a global digital audience of 300 million monthly users across its owned and managed sites, as well as platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. This includes 110 million monthly users in the United States, he said. At present, these numbers are not duplicated.

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