And Then There Were Eight
Our shrinking media universe: 25 years of media mergers, from GE-NBC to Google-YouTube
Click here for "And Then There Were Eight," a timeline of media consolidation over the last 25 years.
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Breaking the News
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Stop the Presses: A statistical snapshot of our shrinking media universe.
A statistical snapshot of our rapidly shrinking media universe.
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A Blogger Says: Save The MSM!
There's an intriguing paradox at the heart of the modern trend toward media consolidation, one that my great-grandfather probably would have appreciated.
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Great, but one problem: I
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Great, but one problem: I think the market value numbers are misleading for some of the companies. If the point is to talk about the concentration of media power, then the market value numbers should be restricted to that of the company's media holdings.
It really wouldn't make much sense to include General Electric's appliance division when talking about how much money NBC makes, nor Microsoft's core, non-media product base (hardware and software) when talking about how much they have in MSN and their share in MSNBC (which is small these days; their primary investment is on the dot-com side instead of the TV side.)
Similarly, I'm not sure that holdings that aren't directly related to information dissemination should be counted for companies like Google. Is their search business really part of the media, or is it just a tool?
The net result of the way things are listed on this graphic is that it looks like Microsoft and Google have some sort of enormous amount of monetary control over media, and they really just don't. It could be argued that they control some of the tools for accessing information, but even so, such things are still only a fraction of their core business. You may as well include Apple on this chart if you're going to talk about access tools, considering the popularity of the iPhone and iTunes, or include RIM, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and every other cable and communication provider.
