Media | Snippet Finance - Part 4

19th May '20

Behind the Scenes

In investing one mostly hears from the CEO, CFO, and investor relations. It is important to dig deeper.
One vital function is the Chief Technology Office (CTO).
Here for example is an excellent post from the outgoing CTO of New York Times.
The legal department is also interesting. Here is a fascinating podcast featuring the general counsel of Netflix.
Incidentally also the first lawyer hired by the company when they were still sending DVDs and who now heads up a team of 650 people.

29th Apr '20

Amazon Commission Cuts

Pretty big move by Amazon – they are planning drastic cuts to affiliate commissions.
This is commissions paid to third party publishers for driving traffic (via links) to Amazon via recommendations.
The cuts look deep and could have serious implications for some media businesses.

21st Apr '20

Barry Diller Interview

Worth listening to Barry Diller on the picture right now.
Barry acquired Expedia right after 9/11. Saying “where there is life there is travel“.
He described today as cataclysmic, no sharp reversal and not being analogous to 09 or 9/11.
Diller spoke of advertising as particularly hit as of Q2.
Expedia (he is chairman) typically spends $5bn per year on advertising but revenues at zero it will be lucky to be $1bn this year.
On that topic this is a good article describing what is happening at GOOG and FB in terms of advertising.
Despite their strong positions and likelihood to gain share things are looking bad.

15th Apr '20

Newspapers

Interesting article about advertisers blacklisting covid19 keywords.
This means that despite news outlets seeing a surge in visitors (The Guardian for example has seen +47% search traffic according to Google Trends), the industry can’t reap the advertising rewards.
The industry can’t catch a break.

19th Mar '20

Media (cont.)

We previously wrote about The Athletic here.
Big article on the company from GQ including their UK assault.
Interesting take on creating content that people actually want.

24th Feb '20

Music Industry

Amazing chart from FT on turnaround in the Music Industry.
It went from “terminal” decline back to growth.
Well done to Len Blavatnik for scooping up Warner Music for just $3.3bn in 2011. Likely worth 5x that now.
Interesting that owners of both Warner and Universal are looking to sell.

10th Feb '20

Disney

This is a chart of the top app downloads in US. Check out Disney.
“The launch of Disney+ in mid-November was unprecedented in the U.S. Its 31 million downloads in Q4 2019 was more than double the total for the next closest app, TikTok.”
It was still top despite launching Nov 12 – some way into the quarter.
Source: Sensor Tower (lots of good app stats inside report).
h/t The Big Picture.

5th Feb '20

Spotify

Great article on Spotify.
“The rise of AirPods, smart speakers, and other wearable devices may not signal the onset of a true platform shift, but it undoubtedly represents a transformational evolution in the way we will consume media — and this emerging paradigm of distributed, “eyes up” device interaction directly benefits audio more than other content categories.“
Nice table comparing the music services as well.

3rd Feb '20

2019 Internet Trend Report

Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends Report is, as always, interesting.
It is a treasure trove of information to do with Internet and Media.
For example this chart showing that in the US the amount of time spent on mobile surpassed time spent watching TV.
More snippets to follow but the whole report is worth a flick.

16th Jan '20

TV Series

Original scripted series hit a new record in 2019 of 532.
Growth was 7% this year, up from 1.6% in 2018 which was a previous record of 495 shows.
The charts is from 2018 – showing massive growth in online – FX have stopped producing the split.

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