Which is why they’ve lost hundreds of billions in value since announcing a slowdown in Facebook users.īut while I oft hammer away on revenue diversity, it is not the only factor on which I grade the prospects of media companies for the decade ahead. Meta can tout its VR face-obscurer all it wants. Lastly, and most importantly, with Trillion-Dollar Death Stars battling for the time, money and attention of increasingly diverse and fragmented consumers, to have any hope of staying in the running, Media Warriors will need to weather twists and turns of the modern media economy, endure the pendulum swing of ever-more fickle audiences daunted by the paradox of choice, and zag while the rest of the market zigs.Įxample: Amazon’s ad business is just 11% of their earnings, but it’s more than Netflix’ entire 2021 revenues and nearly equal to all of Comcast’s 2021 profits. With ad space both diminishing (see first chart) and ignored (other than the Super Bowl, who of you really looks at ads on any platform?), on-platform marketing is going to be the key to gathering audiences, for anything. Secondly, to compete in the Media Wars, over the long haul, combatants for attention, will want/need to keep their audiences “on platform” as long as possible - not only for the revenue that stickiness generates, but in order to promote what they are selling. So companies who rely too heavily on Ads (Google, Meta), OR too heavily on Subscription (Netflix, Spotify) may soon find themselves scrambling to swing the other way.