Wolff: The looming shakeout in digital media
Summary
A Senior figure at Buzzfeed says Buzzfeed is going
strong but everyone else in digital media was in trouble. Shane Smith (CEO of Vice Media) in Scotland last
week at the Edinburgh International TV Festival predicted a catastrophic wave
of digital media consolidation that would help Vice and damage everyone else.
Not dissimilarly, Nick Denton whose Gawker
Media was
forced into bankruptcy said the silver lining for him was that he knew it was
the right time to get out. We are all this, might argue looking at a period of
time in the digital media industry where it is a case of last man standing.Let’s be more precise. There are two clear winners
in digital media, Google and Facebook, and their imperial success has largely
reduced everybody else to a vassal state, living off their patronage and
goodwill.
Key Statistics
- Gawker Media sold this month (August 2016) to Univision for $135 million
- Gawker media forced into a sale after sustaining a $140 million privacy judgement
- Verizon, AOL, Yahoo (the few big traffic pools outside Google + Facebook)
- Business Insider - sold for about 10 times Gawker revenue when Gawker was at the height of the market (last fall) - might have been worth as much as $400 million instead of $135 million.
A Senior figure at Buzzfeed says Buzzfeed is going
strong but everyone else in digital media was in trouble. Shane Smith (CEO of Vice Media) in Scotland last
week at the Edinburgh International TV Festival predicted a catastrophic wave
of digital media consolidation that would help Vice and damage everyone else.
Not dissimilarly, Nick Denton whose Gawker
Media was
forced into bankruptcy said the silver lining for him was that he knew it was
the right time to get out. We are all this, might argue looking at a period of
time in the digital media industry where it is a case of last man standing.Let’s be more precise. There are two clear winners
in digital media, Google and Facebook, and their imperial success has largely
reduced everybody else to a vassal state, living off their patronage and
goodwill.
Key Statistics
- Gawker Media sold this month (August 2016) to Univision for $135 million
- Gawker media forced into a sale after sustaining a $140 million privacy judgement
- Verizon, AOL, Yahoo (the few big traffic pools outside Google + Facebook)
- Business Insider - sold for about 10 times Gawker revenue when Gawker was at the height of the market (last fall) - might have been worth as much as $400 million instead of $135 million.
My Opinion
I did not think I would see such a article about the digital media industry so soon, as like many people my opinion was that the digital media industry is growing quickly and not planning on stopping any time soon. Having said that I am not surprised that it has come out that the digital media industry is in trouble. This is because since the digital world took over everybody rushed to be apart of it to keep businesses afloat etc that it quickly became a very crowded place.
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