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Waypoint publisher Vice Media takes $450m investment

CEO Shane Smith listed gaming as one area of expansion in bid to build "the largest millennial video library in the world"

Vice Media has taken $450 million in investment from TPG, the private equity firm that backed Spotify and Airbnb.

In an interview with CNBC, Vice CEO Shane Smith said that the media company is now worth $5.7 billion. Smith also admitted that bringing in third-party investment is "what we would do if we were going public," as a way of building out the business and bringing in more consistent revenue.

Vice has built its reputation and business on websites and video content aimed at millennials, with gaming just one among a broad range of topics it covers. Waypoint, the company's games media brand, launched last year, and Smith listed gaming as one of the areas Vice would seek to expand with the new investment.

"This will allow us to build up the largest millennial video library in the world - enabling Vice to widen our offering to include news, food, music, fashion, art, travel, gaming, lifestyle, scripted and feature films," he said in a statement.

"Building out this wide-ranging and rich library of gold-standard content will be an essential component of our future direct-to-consumer tech stacks and our innovations in transactional relationships - all of which represent the future of media."

The Vice TV channel, Viceland, is now available in 80 countries. In his interview, Smith stated the company's intention to develop some of its verticals - such as Noisey, its music vertical - into "billion-dollar brands" in their own right.

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Matthew Handrahan

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Matthew Handrahan joined GamesIndustry in 2011, bringing long-form feature-writing experience to the team as well as a deep understanding of the video game development business. He previously spent more than five years at award-winning magazine gamesTM.