Homepage

Baby Reindeer could well herald the start of a new era of performers mining their own trauma for dramatic content, maybe without the proper support they need to do so, in a bid to differentiate themselves from the volume of shows already out there. “The volume of true crime surely asks for that,” says Tom Harrington, Head of Television at Enders Analysis. “With the coming of the streamers, every crime that’s happened has a documentary now and it’s sort of like… I guess you have to stand out.”

“Broadcast news in the UK is very expensive to do,” says Gill Hind, head of TV at media analysts Enders Analysis. “Even if you have economies of scale and pool resources abroad as some outlets do, it’s really expensive to get content up and running.”

“Not surprisingly, if you’re an advertiser, a lot of the time you don’t want your company or product to appear in the news environment,” says Enders’ Hind. “And you can understand why you might night want your brand to appear immediately before or after something that happens in Ukraine, for example.

“This means that the income you get for the news programme if you’re ITV, or news channel if you’re Sky, is a lot less per viewer delivered than it would be for lighter, entertainment programmes.”

Niamh Burns, a senior analyst at Enders Analysis, argues that OpenAI and the FT share enough incentives to sign a deal, but publishers and tech companies bring different perspectives to the negotiating table.

“Publishers say using their content to train LLMs is against their terms of use and that licensing is essential. OpenAI says it doesn’t breach copyright, and frames deals as voluntary support of the journalism sector,” she says.

“Licensing is still a grey area, but these early deals are setting some precedents. The problem for publishers is we have no idea what AI products will look like in a year’s time. They might not even know what to ask for.”

Niamh Burns, a senior analyst at Enders Analysis, said an agreement was bound to be reached ultimately because the presence of UMG content on the platform suited both sides.

“TikTok’s content is way more engaging when it comes with a good music catalogue,” she said. “On the other side, the promotional benefits to UMG and its artists of being on TikTok are clear. You can see that in how Taylor Swift decided unilaterally to return to the platform before her new album was released.”

Analysts at Enders Analysis have previously called DMGT the “most highly touted UK trade buyer” for the Telegraph group but warned it could spark regulatory concerns over media plurality in the UK.

In part the title was vulnerable because of its very nature as a digest of diverse content, says Abi Watson, a senior research analyst at media specialists Enders Analysis. In the digital media revolution, she says, “the brands and the magazines that have done well tend to be those that are specialist” – what she terms a “flight to niche” content.

A bigger challenge for Reader’s Digest, however, was the ageing, decidedly analogue demographic of its readership. It’s not impossible to survive with older readers, says Watson, but you do need to keep finding new ones as, put bluntly, they die off. “Because Reader’s Digest didn’t have a particularly strong digital presence, they’re not refreshing that audience. So they lost that input at the top of the funnel.”