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Disney+ owner Walt Disney, for example, has a powerful North American sports business in the shape of ABC/ESPN. At present, this is a successful linear channel operation, so Disney is not in a hurry to pivot all of it to streaming. There is an ESPN+ streaming offer, sold alongside Disney+ or as part of a discounted bundle. In theory, this could be subsumed into Disney+ but Francois Godard, senior media and telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis says this is unlikely. “ESPN is a powerful brand which speaks to a male demo. In the same way Disney uses Star for its scripted series, there’s no rationale to close or sell the ESPN brand.”

Of those updates, the most commonly talked about are TikTok’s Creativity Program Beta (which replaced the TikTok Creator Fund and the expansion of YouTube’s Partner Program (which replaced YouTube’s Shorts Fund) — both of which were specifically created to monetize short-form video. 

But the fact still stands: “[Creator funds] are a band-aid over the fact that short-form video is not monetized as effectively as long form on YouTube or the Instagram feed, so you need additional incentives for creators to support the newer product on your platform, as well as against your competitors,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders.

“It is a challenged market for sure,” says Douglas McCabe, the chief executive at Enders Analysis. “In terms of a print business, circulation has been falling away at rates of decline that are pretty worrying, volumes are probably down around 65% over the last 10 or 12 years.

“Publishers have some levers, increase cover price and reduce pagination, but it does feel like we are getting toward a period where the industrial scale of print is looking quite small and a lot less sustainable.”

He added “The scale of online audience is very impressive but they’ve not worked out how to retain usage and build value for users. The majority of sites are nowhere near monetising sustainably. The focus seems to be on getting as many eyeballs on a page as you can, but it needs to be about what is valuable.”

“What the Times has done so well with its games strategy to date is that it replicates some of the habit friendly elements of that traditional newspaper experience,” said Joseph Teasdale, head of tech at Enders Analysis. “Everyone gets the same experience around these games on a daily rhythm.”

He added “That’s the other thing about these games the Times is focused on, they’re super cheap. It’s a great return on investment when it comes to subscriber metrics and revenue. That calculation works really well compared to actually developing what people might think a game looks like nowadays.”

"TikTok has burned a lot of trust by dragging its heels on promises made in 2020 and due to the string of revelations about its aggressive harvesting of user data," Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis, told Insider.

James Barford, head of telecoms research at Enders Analysis, said Cityfibre’s scale made it attractive to VMO2 as any integration costs would be spread over a larger base.



But he warned any tie-up would face scrutiny from competition regulators due to “significant overlap” between the two companies’ networks.