“Any settlement will be very generous but the [Murdoch] empire can take and absorb such a shock; it has paid out more than $1bn over the last decade relating to phone hacking,” says Claire Enders, a co-founder of Enders Analysis and a longtime Murdoch watcher.

“Murdoch is someone who settles, quickly, efficiently and is extremely pragmatic in his settlements. Shareholders would find it a relief [but] it also spares a desire to put Mr Murdoch and others on the stand, de-risking any potential embarrassment from a public grilling.”

Alice said “What applies to Fox applies to other media organisations. The pre-trial determination has been seismic. The judge has been clear already saying that Fox knowingly broadcast falsehoods. What we have seen serves as a real warning to other outlets looking to pursue a hard line. It sets a new bar for talk TV in the US in terms of what can or can’t be said by presenters.”

“So far, nothing has really gone Rupert’s way,” says Alice Enders at Enders Analysis. “All this is embarrassing. It’s all bad for Rupert’s legacy.”

She added that Fox’s huge profits mean it can absorb the financial blow. But she adds: “I think the fact that litigation is going to go on and on makes it very difficult to value Fox because it’s got these potential liabilities.”

“It is riveting that Fox lawyers have failed to stop the trial,” says Enders. “I would have thought that someone should have told Rupert many months ago to settle this, even though it may appear to be some form of admission.”

“TikTok led the global short video field over the last few years — 2023 is the first time that run may be challenged,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “TikTok’s user base crossed a billion while ad revenue reached around $9 billion in 2022, up tenfold on 2020. We expect its ad growth to slow a bit to around 40% this year.”

“ByteDance has an advantage here with its pre-existing creator relationships through TikTok,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “They may be hoping that using creators will make Lemon8 less reliant on marketing spend for user growth, though TikTok’s years of hefty marketing outlays suggests there’s no way round spending billions to achieve massive global scale.”

"At a certain point decision-makers at these companies forgot that the harvest period of trend-busting growth and cheap money wouldn't last forever," Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis, told Insider.

Claire Holubowskyj of Enders Analysis told Insider: "Removing the friction from using BNPL in-store will be an important differentiator for consumers, particularly as in-store retail continues to return post-pandemic, and will give Apple a leg up on competitors."

She said Apple won't be expecting a mass uptake of the offering given how fragmented the market is and how late they are to the party. Rolling out Apple Pay Later in one market will limit the risk by allowing the company to "assess performance and reevaluate if necessary," Holubowskyj added. 

She pointed that Apple has a very healthy balance sheet will tens of billions of cash on hand. Neither is it suffering from the same over-hiring problem as other prominent tech companies.

Marshall’s turnover increased 4pc to £36.4million in 2021, with pre-tax profits hitting £5.7million.

Alice Enders, music expert at Enders Analysis, said: ‘The inheritors were stuck in a position where they had to sell it in order to grow it. 

In this sense, the Fed’s monetary tightening has trickled down from economic policymakers in Washington, to the stars in Hollywood and Americans at home on their sofas. “If those macro effects weren’t there you’d probably still have streaming services spending more and more,” said Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders.

Jamie said "The single biggest reason agency groups have grown quicker than tech over the past few quarters is they had a very slow pandemic. Right when agencies hit a nadir in late 2020, big tech was enjoying bumper revenue increases as demand for their services and ecommerce went through the roof."

"Agencies may have caught up a bit last year, but since 2019 the tech companies have grown about four times faster. The major holding groups are forecasting organic revenue growth to halve this year, which will pull them back below the online platforms. It's also notable that the media and creative side of the agency groups lagged their headline growth rates by two percentage points in 2022: they are pivoting towards business transformation and technology services such as first-party data management for future growth."

Joseph Teasdale, the head of technology at Enders, said Twitter’s cuts were being closely scrutinised for their impact: “The big public tech companies . . . want to know: how deeply can you cut without damaging the core product? At minimum, outages at Twitter suggest that firing two thirds of your staff in a matter of months maybe comes with some negative side effects.”

He added that other failures degraded user experience. “In April last year, Musk promised, ‘If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!’ Which sounds like a bad joke to Twitter users given the proliferation of spam since the takeover. Musk has neither defeated the spam bots, nor yet died trying.”