“A recent Enders Analysis report showed that licence fee income has fallen by 28% in the past 15 years. The BBC has cut costs by 15%. It’s found £1.5 billion in savings, and is on target to find another £500 million. Revenues tumbling; costs rising. This equation cannot last. You cannot cut your way to growth.
“The most interesting feature of Play Quest+ is the ability to plug into advertisers’ own ecosystems, enabling better conversion data and allowing users to collect rewards in-game rather than simply for use on Discord itself,” said Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “External integrations target growth on both sides: from IP-motivated users that can benefit from more attractive in-game rewards, and from advertisers who can integrate into Discord’s formats more seamlessly — previously a particular challenge for growing interactive ad formats.”
Creator economy analyst Ben Woods at technology, media and telecoms insights firm Enders Analysis sees the future as less a transfer of ownership from one function to another than a sharing of responsibility: “I think responsibility is becoming more shared rather than simply moving from communications to another department,” he told PRovoke Media.
“A creator might promote a new release, make content around an existing franchise, host a podcast or even produce programming that appears on a streaming service. Different parts of the business will therefore have different reasons for working with them.
“The important thing is having checks and balances around those decisions. Content teams might know who can make something audiences want to watch, while marketing and social teams understand who can reach and engage the right audiences. Communications can bring another perspective: is this someone we are comfortable becoming closely associated with our brand?”
But when it comes to sports, YouTube actually has a different strategy for establishing its presence: "The platform uses its army of creators," explains Ben Woods, a specialist in the creator economy at Enders Analysis. "They often have access to these major events to produce content, before the matches or live while they're commentating on them, when they're not producing podcasts on the subject."
Gareth said "“The primary challenge for The Atlantic with a gaming product is developing a portfolio of puzzles at various levels of complexity that hook recurring players. Leaning into quirkiness and brand identity is an elegant avenue to start, but sustained commitment is the other critical pathway to residual stickiness, with on-time updated daily games,”
“Twenty-five years ago, the way to deliver the best data and best media planning was through increasing specialisation,” says Claire Holubowskyj at Enders Analysis. “Technology, especially AI, has changed that. Everything needs to be more cohesive, which is why you’re seeing so many integrated platforms. Publicis has done some of this consolidation, but doesn’t seem quite as integrated as WPP. Omnicom doesn’t seem to be close to either of them yet.”
Enders Senior Research Analyst Jamie MacEwan said Myspace will have to work harder to attract advertisers than big platforms, which have proven metrics.
“The question for Myspace isn’t will it eat Facebook’s lunch twenty years later, but can it relaunch as a small ads platform and still be profitable,” MacEwan said.
He added that it will have to balance investing in growth with remaining lean as revenues are lower at mid-sized platforms, which are easier for advertisers to ignore. “SMEs are more likely to spend on platforms they already have a presence on.”
"This is a deal that repositions and recovers Disney in the UGC [user-generated content] space following the content gap left by the sudden collapse of Sora," Gareth Sutcliffe from Enders Analysis said.
But he said it was not without risk.
"There is an ongoing safety debate around TikTok under European online rules," he said.
"At a minimum, Disney will need to employ significant guardrails to curate the creator content that is selected."
“The cash injection opens up the opportunity to acquire some of the largest alt-nets in the market, but also potentially wade in on the pending and industry-defining Nexfibre/Netomnia deal,” Karen Egan, analyst at Enders Analysis, said.
CityFibre had been in talks to buy Netomnia before the Nexfibre agreement.
The company could target other, smaller alt-nets such as Community Fibre Ltd or Hyperoptic Ltd. to reach its goal of connecting another 3 million homes, she added. Netomnia, which has more connections to premises, would help reach that goal quicker, she said.
