There are a lot of good ideas that could benefit from big media. You have a lot of companies that hit a wall and can't get beyond a certain level. They need the infrastructure and distribution of a large company.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you could position the best platform media company around the world with the best content, we could get explosive growth.
To be honest with you, I worry about concentration of ownership in media, where you have a handful of media conglomerates largely controlling what we see, hear and read.
Big media companies have lots of money and content, but they have no way to tap into a good base of users.
I really do think we're going through a period of concentration of ownership of media, and we're starting to see the effects at the editorial level, and it's all bad. This increased pressure for profits every quarter, smaller news hole, less coverage of important stuff - the extent that it's become one giant infotainment industry.
Media is very different from financial services. People are very fickle and very vocal. They believe that things should be one way and not the other. It's still very rewarding to build products for huge audiences. It feels like you're making an impact.
Working with the media remains an effective and essential way to raise issues, educate the public, and prod policy-makers and corporate leaders to change for the better.
Most large media firms make outsized investments to acquire and market a small number of titles with strong hit potential, and bank on their sales to make up for middling performance in the rest of their catalogs.
The media can be a really strong vehicle.
I would imagine that if you had a media brand that is solely focused on publishing 5,000-word stories with beautiful proprietary photographs and highly-produced videos, it would be a tough thing to make that economically sustainable.
We have to do more than keep media giants from growing larger; they're already too big. We need a new set of rules that will break these huge companies to pieces.