Vice was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017.

In 2023, it sold for $350 million. Disney wrote off their $400 million investment four years earlier.

BuzzFeed won a Pulitzer Prize. Their stock went from $10 to under $1. They shut down the news division and laid off 15% of the company.

When investors say they've seen media deals blow up, they're right.

But they're describing equity failures, not credit failures.

Equity investors in Vice bet on infinite growth, platform dominance, and a path to becoming the next MTV. They were wrong.

A credit investor would have asked different questions. What's the cash flow? What's the cost structure? What happens if growth slows?

Credit discipline reveals what equity optimism obscures.

The deals that blew up shared common characteristics: platform dependency, unsustainable cost structures, concentrated revenue, and valuations built on narratives instead of numbers.

Those aren't media problems. Those are underwriting problems.

The lesson from Vice isn't that media credit doesn't work. It's that bad underwriting doesn't work.