Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, says Vodafone bought this business “at the peak of its operational performance” and the deal “left them in a precarious position from a leverage perspective, and that became a huge distraction for management when Nick Read took over”.

The company has also sought to “diversify” its business over several years. François Godard, a senior media and telecoms analyst at the research firm Enders, estimates that Sky Mobile had 3.5 million customers at the end of 2023, up 11 per cent, and that Sky Broadband had 6.7 million, up 2 per cent. Comcast said its “international connectivity” revenues, from Sky in the UK and Italy, totalled $4.2 billion last year, an increase of 23 per cent.

“It would be challenging to pull off,” said Francois Godard, an analyst at Enders Analysis. “You need to recruit technical and commercial expertise in a short time.”

Abi Watson, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis, said the announcement was an “inevitability” as the Evening Standard was among the most exposed newspapers post-pandemic “given the fact that mobility, especially in London, has remained depressed thanks to work from home”. She noted that it was following other free titles that had reduced their frequency or stopped print editions such as Stylist and Time Out London.

“AI threatens search’s core proposition by being more efficient than the search process in many ways, but is currently less verifiably accurate,” says Claire Holubowskyj, of Enders Analysis. “Google is scrambling to find the right balance before a competitor disintermediates its hugely valuable search product.”

“The story of media before was that you had to be big to make money – that was the basic lesson of media,” says Douglas McCabe, chief executive of Enders Analysis.

“But actually, the story of the internet is that when companies or publishers do one single thing much more narrowly, but do it really well, they will tend to succeed.”

McCabe says a “recalibration” is likely, especially during the first year of a Labour government.

With just six weeks to go before the election, any government decision on the new ownership is expected to be made by a Labour government – if the polls are proved right. Alice Enders, head of research at Enders Analysis, said the situation had turned the paper into a “ghost ship”.

Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis, agreed: “It does look odd on the surface that Google would take this long to reassure the CMA on down-ranking.” But, he said, that could be because Google doesn’t want to close down its options on the way it rates the quality of a website — and those factors often have nothing to do with advertising. “Since some of the APIs cover user protections like fighting spam and fraud, Google might be concerned that, should Sandbox be the sole alternative to cookies in some cases, giving up down-ranking powers could be a problem down the line,” he said.

“It’s almost a victim of its own success,” says Enders Analysis senior media analyst Jamie MacEwan. “It’s always there in the background. And you don’t think, you just type in YouTube and you find whatever you need.”

That ubiquity is obvious in the numbers. Upwards of 2.5bn people worldwide use YouTube each month, and US users spend around 45 minutes on the service on average every day. “When you’re looking at social media platforms, YouTube’s got that unparalleled reach and time spent viewing,” says MacEwan.

But for those actually creating new content for YouTube, the shift to shorts has been disruptive and often painful. “It’s been tough, as YouTube shorts are definitely less monetizable at the moment,” says MacEwan. “It’s got so many products, and with creators you’re trying to convince them to do many different formats.”

But while competing in web-based, ultra-short form is clearly a priority for YouTube, it’s also doing pretty well going the other way. “A huge chunk of YouTube’s business and the revenue it is generating is from sitting on the TV screen alongside Netflix or broadcasters,” says MacEwan. “The latest figures from Nielsen show that YouTube was getting about 10% of US TV viewing, which is more than Netflix.”

Niamh Burns, a senior analyst at Enders Analysis, says there will be a stream of new products as companies, backed by multibillion-dollar investments, try to win over consumers. “We’re going to keep seeing these flashy releases, because the tech is new and exciting, and because the actual consumer use case hasn’t been landed on. New models and even just new interfaces – simply put, things to do with the models – need to be released until something sticks from a user perspective,” she says.