Viceland’s Low Ratings Aren’t the Problem: Shane Smith Is

Nearly six months have elapsed since the much-ballyhooed launch of Viceland, the A&E Networks and Vice Media joint linear TV network that was supposed to be a magnet for millennial viewers.

Vice Media CEO Shane Smith gave a plethora of pre-launch interviews to a number of outlets, explaining why Viceland would succeed where youth-skewing, socially conscious networks like Current TV (and, now, Pivot) had failed.

“Twelve months from now we’ll be on the cover of Time magazine as the guys who brought millennials back to TV,” a cocksure Smith told the Hollywood Reporter.

[...] Smith set himself up as the Millennial Whisperer, or perhaps some sort of Pied Piper, leading the Youth to television instead of into a river to drown.

Prior to the channel’s launch, A&E and Vice struck a deal with Nielsen to suppress the reporting of Viceland’s ratings for six months, ostensibly to give the network time to grow and evolve naturally, away from the prying eyes of acerbic critics.

[...] A&E Networks CEO Nancy Dubuc was quick to point out to WSJ that huge linear TV ratings for Viceland aren’t really the point of the venture.

[...] the reason every media reporter worth their salt was digging around to get ratings data for Viceland wasn’t because they doubted Vice and A&E would find a way to make money off a TV network.

When TV viewership among 18-34s for the Olympic Games — one of the more widely watched TV events that theoretically appeals to all ages — is down as much as 33 percent on some nights, you know there’s no going back.

Smith — who, perhaps a little ironically, is a member of Gen X — built Vice Media into a digital powerhouse by creating content that seemed to appeal to Gen Y and putting it where they wanted to look at it (online), and by creating their own in-house ad agency.

YouTube considers any play longer than 30 seconds a “view,” and so any comparison to TV ratings, which indicate average viewership per minute, is bunk.

Or maybe those younger viewers won’t watch anything on TV, regardless of the quality or how much it’s designed to appeal to them?

In 2015, Adult Swim averaged 669,000 viewers per day in the 18-49 demographic (it airs from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.), or nearly 15 times Viceland’s primetime 18-49 audience, and its median viewer age is 25.