Douglas said “The Sun’s done an amazing job relatively recently building its US audience. In a digital world, it nuts for [UK news websites] not to try for a global audience. And in fact they’ve been relatively slow at doing that.

“Mail Online’s built up a big US audience, The Sun is now building up a big US audience. But it’s sort of surprising that the English-language British news media are not going for broke on global – that’s the way to really make your brand fly.”

He added “What publishers have done is taken a print model and effectively transitioned that into an online environment without really knowing if that works,” he said. “And if you were starting from scratch, you probably wouldn’t have a newsroom with 500 journalists in it creating enough content to fill a newspaper every day.

“Apple TV+ is the smallest and [least] watched with a smaller program library, thus the most exposed to churn,” Enders Analysis analyst François Godard notes. In contrast, the launch of Netflix’s new ad-supported subscription tier is poised to be a “handy option for consumers seeking cuts in spending,” he says, especially for users who otherwise might have canceled their Netflix subscription because of its higher price point (the standard subscription jumped from $13.99 to $15.49 a month in January).

Jamie said the site has a long way to go before corporate users will look twice at it.

“Mastodon has all the disadvantages of decentralisation. It's unintuitive, it's got patchy moderation to put it kindly, and your home server could be switched off at any point. It's a nightmare for the average user.”

He added “So long as Twitter is functioning, Mastodon will be there as a niche fallback option. Twitter would have to implode for that to change.”

Francois said "Sky Deutschland is subscale compared to its UK sister. Maybe a German buyer could merge it with something else and get to scale.”

Media analyst Tom Harrington agrees: “Allen has had a couple of hits in the last couple of decades. Backing him only makes sense if it’s a tax write-off.”

Alice Enders says a second bid would be a logical move for the Australian media mogul. She also points to potential interest from Lagadere, the owner of French publisher Hachette.



Enders said the Penguin decision was an unfortunate setback, adding that the deal would have given Bertelsmann a powerful position in the US market. She argues that the major issue is the German group’s focus on old media such as books, magazines and free-to-air television, which has left it struggling to build scale in developed markets with tough competition regimes.



“This is an old media company,” Enders says.



“When you’re in something of a pressured old media industry then you’ve got to look for scale.”

Long-standing music analyst at Enders Analysis Alice Enders said Ek’s comments sit within a long-standing saga between tech firms, which hinges on owning “the direct relationship with the customer”.

She told City A.M. that Spotify has a “frenemy” relationship with Apple, which means despite its flurry of criticism, it knows Apple is the ultimate gatekeeper to the army of iPhone users that it needs to keep happy.