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Enders Analysis provides a subscription research service covering the media, entertainment, mobile and fixed telecommunications industries in Europe, with a special focus on new technologies and media.

Our research is independent and evidence-based, covering all sides of the market: consumers, leading companies, industry trends, forecasts and public policy & regulation. A complete list of our research can be found here.

 

Rigorous Fearless Independent

Financial Times

8 November 2017

Claire Enders was quoted in an article on the prospect of Mr Murdoch and his sons to sale 21st Century Fox prime film and television assets to Walt Disney. Claire said “you will not find the Murdochs selling a damn thing unless they are forced to — or humiliated politically. They’ve never been sellers and don’t need the money”. She added that James Murdoch was particularly personally invested in acquiring Sky, saying “he has spent 10 years trying to buy it. [James] has always been a one-track guy”. Six years ago, the family’s reputation took a knock from the phone-hacking scandal, which led to Rupert Murdoch apologising to MPs and the eventual withdrawal of its first Sky bid. Claire said “there are huge reputational advantages to James and the Murdochs of this [latest] deal clearing”.

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Premier League: winner's curse

25 October 2017

The Premier league (PL) will be hoping for another huge increase in rights payments in the upcoming auction for the three seasons starting 2019/20.

Aggressive competition between BT Sport and Sky has led to hyperinflation of most premium sports rights. Sport now accounts for two thirds of multichannel content spend, but only 8% of its viewing.

BT’s current financial position makes it difficult to justify expansion or further hyperinflation of its PL rights portfolio, but it cannot withdraw completely.

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Google's golden age of search

19 October 2017

Google has beaten Facebook in mobile revenue growth, and competes successfully in retail search with Amazon

Intelligent user interfaces based on machine learning have become a core competitive strength, with social and messaging the main remaining weak points

Rising political pressure due to Google’s growing scale and influence is now a bigger concern than commercial risk, as the threat of regulatory intervention limits strategic options in partnerships, M&A and integration

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21CF/Sky transaction heads to the CMA

19 October 2017

21CF’s bid for 100% ownership of Sky has been referred for a Phase 2 investigation to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which will decide by 6 March 2018

Third parties Avaaz and Ed Miliband MP complain of the influence of the Murdoch Family Trust (MFT) and family members over the UK’s news agenda and political process 

A remedy could insulate Sky News from this influence. The offer of a Sky News Editorial Board at Phase 1 was refused. Third parties will ensure the debate in Phase 2 is very lively

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Sky Q1 2017/18 results: Solid quarter, but challenges remain

16 October 2017

Sky made a strong start to fiscal 2018, with improved customer net adds across each of its markets versus the previous quarter, as well as group revenue growth at 5%.

Operating profits switched back to growth, after the negative Premier League effect annualised out, with it now settled at the full cost of £1.4 billion per year. EBITDA growth hit 11%, or 15% excluding the effect of UK mobile and the Spanish OTT launch.

Against the backdrop of continued uncertainty around the UK advertising market, attention has turned to the upcoming Premier League auction, though we think it unlikely that digital players will cause disruption.

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News and Facebook

10 October 2017

Even though Facebook is not a producer of news, 6.5 million UK internet users claim to mainly source their news from the platform. Posts and shares by friends in the user's network, in the context of Facebook's algorithm, determine the order of stories in the personalised News Feed, removing the control of the news agenda that publishers have for their websites

Premium publishers operating a paywall (The Times, The Financial Times) have a lower key approach to Facebook than publishers generating advertising revenue from referral traffic to their websites or from on-platform consumption of Instant Articles. The latter will seek to stimulate social media engagement, optimising stories through attention-grabbing headlines, and installing Facebook’s share and like buttons on their websites

Case studies of the news stories that were prominent on Facebook (measured by likes, comments and shares) in the periods leading up to the Brexit Referendum and General Election 2017 votes respectively demonstrate that newspaper brands (the Express for Brexit, and The Guardian for the General Election) achieved the highest reach on Facebook during these periods, despite being ranked below other news brands (BBC in particular) in terms of traffic to their websites

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Supply of news in the UK

9 October 2017

Since Communications Act 2003, the number of national news outlets supplied on broadcast and in print has been stable. Adoption of multi-channel TV, supported by Freeview, has augmented the number of homes accessing on a free-to-air basis five "all news" channels (BBC News, BBC Parliament, Sky News, CNN, Russia Today), with many more all news channels served on pay-TV platforms

Original news production has been transformed by digital tools and Twitter occupies the centre of the journalism ecosystem. Jobs devoted to news production are in recovery, although mask a decline in newspapers to the benefit of online mainly

Expansion of fixed-line broadband and, more recently, consumer adoption of mobile broadband and connected devices, have made the internet a platform for the supply of and consumption of all news services. Broadcasters serve eponymous text-based websites, all newspapers serve websites, and native news outlets have entered the market due to low barriers to entry. Prominent native brands in the political genre include Buzzfeed, HuffPost and Politico

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The Times

9 October 2017

Douglas McCabe was quoted in an article on Glamour magazine, which announced yesterday that it would relaunch as a “digital first” beauty brand, with its final monthly magazine coming out next month. Although the Condé Nast title will publish a “collectible” edition every six months, the new direction reflects alarm within the publishing industry about the long-term future of beauty and celebrity magazines. Douglas said “circulation has been declining very rapidly across magazines generally but the women’s sector in particular, really since the smartphone became mass market.”

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Financial Times

9 October 2017

Douglas McCabe was quoted in an article on the magazine world, where even the most prestigious titles have been challenged by the never-ending penetration of the internet and its abundance of free news and entertainment. With circulation and advertising revenues under pressure on both sides of the Atlantic magazines are facing an increasingly uncertain future. In fact, Magna Global, a media buying agency, expects magazines’ global advertising revenues to fall 13 per cent this year, while Enders Analysis, a media research group, has warned that the consumer magazine market was reaching “an existential threshold”. Douglas said “the industry is shrinking, and the decline seems to be accelerating both in circulation and in advertising — for print and online”. In the longer term, magazine publishers still have to work out what to do about the internet. He added “the way print advertising always worked was advertisers would pay for a magazine’s audience but also for the environment and the context”, but online magazines “have nothing like the same context and resonance” because a reader might stumble across an article on Facebook or Twitter and then immediately go somewhere else. Publishers, he says, have been “chasing a myth about digital advertising. In print they might have 100,000 readers while online they can get 10m. But that’s irrelevant because the 100,000 are the right 100,000 and more valuable”. Online advertising rates continue to lag print rates at their peak so in chasing large online readerships, magazines have “diluted the very essence of their brand . . . they have lost sight of what audience targeting really means”.

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