Douglas said "The fear is that the value chain has Amazon at the front and centre - it has become so powerful. That's why publishers are trying to get as big as possible in order to negotiate with this giant tech business."

"With a traditional book retailer, they are going to have a tough negotiation, but the starting point is we are in this together to sell more books. Sure Amazon wants to sell as many books as possible, but it also wants to sell lots of other things."

James said there was “frustration” from some operators that the Goverment's rules continued to change. He added. “£250m is a lot less than this is costing the operators."

Julian said “It seems to have struck at the heart of this overarching issue, which is this year, how do you put sports and entertainment in front of viewers and consumers? Cinema has yet to find the answer either.”

Alice said "A lot of the issues that have faced the publishing industry this year look set to continue next year, we don’t have a path back to normality yet. The macroeconomic position of the country is still going to strongly affect advertising, as well as consumer behaviour."

"One of the big themes that I think will come into next year is M&A and consolidation. A lot of the traditional, legacy players are ripe to be picked, and I expect we’ll see more transactions. And then from a news perspective, that opens up a number of doors around regulation and competition policy. There are very specific aspects of competition law which relate to newspapers, and which prevent certain mergers from happening. Next year we might see cases where a newspaper is either acquired by a larger group, or closes down. And if competition law blocks those acquisitions and the smaller groups close down, then you get ‘news deserts’ of areas not served by local newspapers."

Francois said “The point of the European super league project is to create a monopolist employer of players. Cost control is where they must take action.”

Sanchit said “Bezos and Amazon took the pandemic very seriously and didn’t fall asleep at the wheel like others did." 

He added that Bezos’ technology roots have laid a foundation for “the most flexible e-commerce plan in the world."

Tom said "the service is integrated with around 4.3m Sky Q boxes,  which comprises around half of all Sky TV subscribers...Integration of Netflix and later Disney+ in 2020 into Sky Q indicates that it is a keen platform to drive SVOD subscriptions"

He said "smaller services may “find it difficult to get traction, which is why Discovery+ is being given away for free [for a year] on Sky Q to people who’ve shown they are willing to pay a bit more for TV.”

“Everyone’s restructuring around streaming, whether it is the BBC, ITV, NBC Universal and even Disney. Not every streamer will survive.”

BuzzFeed, venture capital-funded and ad-supported, is a bellwether for the health of the digital media industry and a mild obsession for publishers and industry analysts. In buying HuffPost (which Peretti co-founded), the sum of their two parts won’t be much greater than the whole, but given the challenging ad market, their future is more optimistic together, said Alice 

“Shrinkage seems inevitable,” she said, “but at a far slower pace and with a more optimistic outlook than if BuzzFeed and HuffPost had remained separate entities.”

Douglas said "Mr Lynch’s plans were "perfectly good ideas", but would probably be less profitable than the margins Condé Nast’s magazines commanded in their 1990s heyday. “They’re not going to replace all that revenue by having clever ecommerce widgets or gift boxes" he said. 

"The big challenge for a number of publishers is that they are having to think about a world in which the amount of revenue that can be generated from being an important media brand . . . is probably just fundamentally worth less than it used to be" Douglas added.