Vice Media and Rogers team up in $100 million content creation hub in Toronto

Rogers Communications and Vice Media have entered into a $100 million joint venture partnership to create a multimedia studio in Toronto that will produce content for mobile, web and TV, starting in 2014. The focus is the 18-34 market, according to a story in Marketing magazine, creating news, drama, documentaries and original programming built around food, sport, fashion and tech.

The two companies say the Vice Canada Studio is intended to address the “dramatic shift” in media consumption, with nearly 70% of adults 18-24 now receiving news and entertainment from mobile and digital devices, compared with only 30% of adults 40+.

The content will include

• Daily mobile blasts of Canadian-made news and information, including exclusives for Rogers and Fido customers;
• Vice TV Formats, a new slate of TV formats developed, produced and made with Canadian talent;
• Vice Plus, mobile adaptations of Vice’s new and best-known franchises, including the environmental show Toxic and F*ck That’s Delicious, starring rapper and former chef Action Bronson;
• Pilots for new Vice shows

Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith said in a release

 “It was 20 years ago, deep down in the port of Old Montreal, that we set out to try and make a magazine that didn’t suck, This year we return to the homeland, all our hard lessons learned, to build from scratch a completely horizontally and vertically integrated ultra-modern media entity.Essentially we are building a content creation hub that will generate premium video for a cutting edge media company." 

Vice got its start in Montreal in 1994 as an alternative magazine and has since become major international media player.

Magazine traditional ad revenues will be flat or declining through 2018, says PwC; but digital growth will help hold the line

A story in Ad Age summarizing some of the implications for the magazine industry of the just-released PwC annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2014-2018 suggests that while traditional advertising revenues will be flat or declining, digital growth will help to hold the line.

Consumer magazine revenue will be essentially flat this year at $24.6 billion compared with 2013, according to the annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook from PricewaterhouseCoopers, which was released on Tuesday. It will remain at approximately $24.6 billion through 2018, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted.

According to a report in Publishing Executive,  the big takeaway is that as the entertainment and media industry becomes more digitized, advertising growth is outpacing consumer spending. Unsurprisingly, this reveals that consumers are less inclined to pay for digital content. 

Digital consumer magazine revenue is much larger than digital circulation. Digital consumer magazine advertising revenue will rise by an average of 19.2 percent a year from US$3.15 billion in 2013 to US$7.6 billion in 2018; Digital circulation revenue will be just US$1.45 billion in 2018.