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Enders Analysis wrote in a note: “Despite recent reports that News UK wants to make TalkTV less reliant on Piers Morgan, its viewing is noticeably more concentrated around its star man and peak hours than GB News’.”
CVC’s proposition is that such a market also exists for rugby supporters and a broadcaster will be willing to pay a significant premium for exclusivity for a long-term period. According to Francois Godard, a media analyst at Enders Analysis, this will then create a symbiotic relationship between the broadcaster and the sport, in much the same way that Sky Sports has helped to propel the Premier League to its current stratospheric heights. “You need broadcasters to invest in the sport,” Godard said. “If you have a three-year contract then it is like having a three-year flat rental. Are you going to spend money on the apartment? No. If you have a 12-year contract then you are going to take a lot better care of it.”
For Alice Enders, head of research at Enders Analysis, these recent announcements were different to those in previous years.
She said: “The primary reasons for this round of cuts by Big Tech are strategic rather than cost-cutting. Google, for example, is reorienting its operations towards AI tools for advertisers and that requires a specific set of skills in its operations.
“And [it is] reducing or indeed eliminating non-strategic operations, such as resources occupied by the Voice Assistant or AR, which were all the rage a while ago. Amazon also cut its Voice Assistant investment, for example.”
However, Enders stressed it was not “the same driver” for job cuts in the case of every company.
More problematic was how few strings were attached to how the Premiership clubs spent their windfall. This directly influenced CVC’s subsequent moves into La Liga and Ligue 1 in Spain and France, according to Francois Godard, a media analyst at Enders Media.
“The mistake they made was not to control their spending,” Godard said. “They invested in these leagues but they did not have any commitments in contract terms on what the clubs could do with the liquidity. As a result, the clubs spend a lot on players as opposed to investing in their stadium, branding, infrastructure, digital services. As a result, the football clubs in France and Spain are committed to spending around 70 per cent of their liquidity on infrastructure.”
The quest for sustainability in the UK national news industry is gaining ground, thanks to digital growth offsetting relentless print decline. The challenge of the print-to-digital transition has not faded, however, amidst the oncoming cliff-edge for print.
Nationals choosing the path of the walled garden on digital have out-performed those in pursuit of the ad-supported mass-market audience, whose ad yield per user is being compressed by more efficient scale platforms and the end of tracking technology.
Despite the challenges facing the news industry, the beacon of light shone by professional journalism has never been more important to humanity, to combat disinformation and misinformation on the internet, which Gen AI tools will only exacerbate.
Book pricing has stagnated over the past two decades, leading to severe real-term declines in price per book. Nominal prices are now on the rise, but they are still swamped by inflation, and there is no prospect of them catching up to where they were.
The cost to produce books has been hit by many of the same inflationary conditions affecting companies (and people) across the board, leading to tough conditions at publishers, particularly small ones.
Fortunately, books offer many ways for publishers to price discriminate, charging more to price-insensitive, motivated readers.
“She’s closer to the creative process than the really big TV producers like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, which may be a product of the fact that she appears in most of the shows she produces,” says Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis.
“Her output deal with NBCU means she is more than an actor/writer who moves from project to project. She is linked to Lorne Michaels, but she’s far beyond other ex-SNL stars that leave, have a Lorne-produced film and then go back to a career of a jobbing comedic actor. Indeed, she tipped as his successor which would make her one of the most powerful women in comedy.”
Claire Enders, who runs media analyst Enders Analysis, argues Channel 4’s move had likely been a “long time in the works,” harking back to the network’s pre-pandemic nations and regions push, before it was almost sold.
She says the plan shows that “‘levelling up’ and going digital are still the priority for Channel 4.”
“The media industry these days requires lower overheads,” she adds. “Channel 4 should be commended for trying to get close to a sustainable size.”
“Compared to social media or a TV channel the harms of allowing extremist content are lower for Substack, because people don’t find newsletters on Substack,” says Joe Teasdale at Enders Analysis. “It basically just provides publishing, communication and payments services.”