What Do Investors’ Actions Tell Us About Media’s Future?

Everybody has their own hot take on the media. The coldest eye likely comes from (or probably should come from) those who put their own money on the line. Publicly-traded media companies share a lot of mandatory financial information, but what drives the perspectives of those looking a bit further down the road, without the benefit of hindsight? What are venture capital funds or those seeking to raise new money in the media business most excited—and concerned—about today? And what might that suggest for the publishing world? In general, there's a lot of negative buzz about media by folks inside and outside the business. Conventional wisdom (surely you’ve seen it around) holds that there’s too much content out there; traditional media consumption is falling; digital advertising is damaged by a lack of transparency and standardized measurement; new business models are unsettled; the ad tech sector was way over-invested; and the FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) are sucking up all of the oxygen—not to mention the money. Certainly, there's a parade of scare stories for digital-native content companies, as Awesomeness was sold last year to Viacom for a price somewhere between $25–100 million, down from a $650-million valuation in 2016, Bustle Digital Group purchased Mic for $5 million (down from a $100-million valuation a year earlier) and Vice Media’s valuation has deflated from $5.7 billion to around $4.9 billion in little more than a year. Yet... Continue reading at 'Folio Magazine'

[ Folio Magazine | 2019-04-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #market ripe #high-quality news

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