Disney's fight for the streaming crown causes further problems: With this focus, Disney reaches fewer people through other channels such as TV or cinema, which are important for branding, especially for families, says François Godard, analyst at London-based consulting firm Enders Analysis. "Disney not only needs to make its streaming service profitable, but also draw attention to its iconic content to feed theme parks and merchandising, for example."

Media analyst Claire Enders said news channels rarely made a profit but this was not the objective for owners such as Saudi Arabia.

She said that the state had been watching the media strategy of Qatar — including its acquisition of sports rights — and was in effect using the same playbook.

“Al Jazeera helped normalise Qatar. Saudi has unlimited resources to invest in a similar media strategy to legitimise their position in the world and help them access people. A news channel is part of a wider multibillion-dollar media strategy.”

Karen Egan at Enders Analysis said: “The downward financial spiral of Three UK and Vodafone to an extent is signalling that the market is overcrowded and cannot support four nationwide players at these revenue levels and with an expanding cost base.”

“It is a real scourge. Since Spotify has sought to open up to everyone, for and not only to the majors, it has been confronted with individuals who use bots to inflate the audience of songs that have nothing artistic about them”, underlines Alice Enders, from Enders Analysis. According to her, there are more and more 30-second clips on the platform, no doubt generated by AI. The share of streams from majors and independent labels has thus increased from 85% in 2018 to 75% in 2022.

In this remaining quarter, "there are certainly amateur musicians, who use bots to climb and get noticed by record companies, but also more and more scammers who seek to siphon off the income of genuine creators", she says.

Joseph Teasdale, tech industries expert at consultancy Enders Analysis, told i: “Nobody ever worked out a successful business model for free online journalism when Facebook changed its algorithm. It’s the end of an era for the web 2.0 generation.

“Everyone was looking for a wunderkid messiah. A digital Napoleon. People wanted to believe in a new Zuckerberg, somebody who just got the new world unlike the legacy media fuddy-duddies.”

“That is part of it but I still think we would still be in the same place today anyway,” says Joseph Teasdale, of analysts Enders. “The fact is BuzzFeed has been scrambling for a business model: the social web it was built for has gone away. It is the end of the road for a certain model of online journalism. For years companies like Vice and BuzzFeed were valued like tech companies; everyone was looking for something like the next Facebook, but they weren’t it.”

Karen Egan, telecoms expert at Enders Analysis, said the combination of Three and Vodafone could transform the fortunes of struggling operators, with Three UK on a ‘downward spiral’ as the country’s smallest player behind BT-owned EE, Virgin Media O2 and Vodafone.

Analysts at Enders suggest that the CMA is not demonstrating the ‘pro-business approach’ needed for the deal to go through. Vodafone shares fell 1.7 per cent, or 1.64p, to 94.52p.

Karen Egan, head of mobile at Enders Analysis, said: “The combination has the potential to transform the fortunes of two struggling operators, with deal upside predicated on cost synergies rather than on rising prices, which we do not foresee."

“It looks like we’re at the end of the road for a generation of digital media companies,” says Joseph Teasdale at Enders Analysis.

He added “Companies like Buzzfeed and Vice were once thought to be the future of news. As long as they were growing readership and generating buzz, investors were willing to throw money at them, but the reality is they never figured out a sustainable business model.”

“The best options right now seem to be finding an audience who are willing to pay, or attracting such a valuable demographic that advertisers will spend big to reach them, but it's a struggle even then.”