How corporate media—largely tradition-bound behemoths—are doing on the web has been a pretty closely held secret. Sure, they’ll release revenue figures, but profit figures are rare to non-existent. Most large media companies don’t even break out their online operations in their financial statements.
Now, according to Richard Siklos’s account in the New York Times, that may be starting to change.
- Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation lost US$68 million on just under US$1 billion of “other” revenue that, in addition to its online activities, includes “billboard companies in Russia and Eastern Europe, a record label in New Zealand, and Israeli technology company, and a business that owns the broadcast and sponsorship rights to the 2007 Cricket World Cup.”
- The Tribune Company’s digital media revenue totalled US$225 million; no mention of profit or loss.
- Disney is generating about US$500 million in online advertising; again, no mention of profit or loss.
- Sumner Redstone, Viacom chair, told Siklos that he expected to have a US$500 million business within three years.
Siklos points out that online is still small potatoes for big media—only about six percent of US advertising spending goes to online—even though it’s the fastest growing category (up 38% this year) and PricewaterhouuseCoopers expects that number to double to US$51.6 billion over the next five years.
The future of internet media, however, is not with the big corporations; it lies in micropublishing to very well-defined market niches. That’s not to say that general interest publications can’t succeed online—they can—but they’re going to have to be small, decentralized, quick-moving, and decidedly non-corporate.
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