10 Enduring Media Business Lessons From 10 Years With Forbes

Maybe it’s the afterglow of the Paris Olympics and maybe it’s me celebrating my 10^th anniversary with Forbes, but I am a bit fixated on an old French expression to describe what I’ve seen in the media business over that time: La plus ca change, la plus ca meme chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). Side by side with enormous secular change, we still see a media industry grappling with challenges that were there 10 years ago and remain today. In no particular order, with the benefit of hindsight (and the Forbes archives), here is one humble contributor’s take on some of the key media business lessons of the last 10 years.

Media’s “new” business model is far from settled

As early as September 2015, I wrote about the existential crisis facing cable networks, positing that HBO might well be the “last network standing” (no I didn’t envision the brand being buried within a service called Max). In 2017, I wrote about the hazardous place in the vast “middle” of the media business, yet years later we still see the bloated array of cable networks that many households have grown weary of supporting. For the studio sides of the content business, the strategy has shifted from taking big bucks for licensing their content to Netflix, to pulling content from Netflix to launch their own direct to consumer subscription services without advertising, to adding advertising to those same services, to rethinking the “arms race” model of licensing content. La plus ca change indeed.

Wall Street hasn’t produced the magic solution

It’s never easy to properly value media businesses – look at the recent impairment charges from Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global. In 2019, I noted how Netflix missed earnings and the market panicked, but Netflix has hardly missed a beat since. The rush to pour money into Disney when they announced Disney+ in 2017 and when it launched in 2019 wasn’t a great long-term call. And the lucrative (for investment bankers) strategy of mergers and acquisitions has yet to find too many media winners. I wrote about Viacom struggling in 2016, they then re-merged with CBS in 2019, and neither that deal nor the merger/takeover of Paramount Global and Skydance have provided much cause for optimism. And how many bad deals can one company be involved in from AOL Time Warner to AT&T/Warner Media to Warner Bros. Discovery? This isn’t about deals – it’s about fundamental shifts in consumer power and technology. Maybe hope and change are due for a comeback.

The sports bubble never bursts

Ever hear about the economist that predicted six of the last two recessions? We could say the same about those who have long forecasted (and maybe even longed for) the bursting of the sports bubble. Despite massive turmoil in the regional sports network world in particular, the stunning value of sports franchises and sports media rights continues. Even in a world of extraordinary uncertainty – and maybe directly as a result of that – we have witnessed hugely expensive long-term rights deals for college football and the NBA in the last year, sports franchises that are being sold for exponentially more than their owners paid for them a few years ago, and an Olympic multi-platform telecast that just partied like it was 1999. No fat lady singing here – it ain’t over.

Content alone isn’t King, but still provides a lot of magic

If you’re in the media business, it is pretty easy to get jaded about business realities, industry politics and never-satisfied corporate bosses. But some of the most fun and rewarding writing I’ve done over the years has been about content that people can’t stop talking about, or in a few cases hadn’t yet started to talk about. From the creation of Serial in 2015, which helped launch the true crime podcast genre, through the stunning and zeitgeist-grabbing The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017 to my surprising love of Yellowstone, it’s good to know that great, distinctive content, no matter the business model, will always find a way to touch hearts and minds.

News business struggles have worsened, and consequences seem ever-graver

We all have our causes, and among mine has always been the need to sustain independent quality journalism. I even wrote a piece back in 2016 encouraging the use of year-end charitable donations to a series of worthy non-profit news organizations (as worthy today as ever). But it saddens me to see how much the struggles of the news business have only deepened in the last decade. It’s been a tried-and-true topic for me including through local, national, and international lenses. Unfortunately, it remains a conundrum with bigger implications than how to make money – it’s about ensuring a democratic future and we clearly haven’t solved it.

In advertising, massive change and inertia go hand in hand

As much as the media world changes, so much in advertising doesn’t change or changes extraordinarily slowly. Nielsen’s on the way out as a dominant currency in media advertising right? Well, it seemed that way in 2016 (and 2017, and 2023), but despite all of the new flashier entrants, somehow they are still a critical part of the media ad ecosystem. How much money can you spend on committing upfront to a year of advertising when data and the world moves so fast? Apparently, the answer is still many billions of dollars. And of course, technology will solve privacy challenges such as ending tracking cookies on digital advertising, right? Umm…Godot still hasn’t shown up there.

Everyone is still trying to figure out streaming

The big bang of streaming hit in 2006-07 with the shift of Netflix from DVDs to streaming, Google’s purchase of YouTube and the launch of Hulu by NBCUniversal, Fox and ultimately Disney. It’s 2024 and streaming remains in a massive state of flux. Take a look at some of the topics from my Forbes pieces over the years and you can see the opportunities and ongoing challenges – from AT&T’s Fullscreen and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi (remember them?) through MLB Advanced Media, vMVPDs, FAST channels, digital linear, DTC and the newest generation of bundles. Yeah, one of these days….

Regulators are always playing catch-up

For someone that grew up in government and then the media business in the days when legislators and regulators tried to address industry issues on a bipartisan basis (yes, kids, that was a thing), it’s been a particularly trying decade watching regulators flail at getting a handle on the rapidly changing media landscape. I’ve addressed the advent, retreat, and revival of net neutrality (grafting old-line common carrier regulation onto the innovative internet), an asleep-at-the-wheel approach to early big tech mergers from Facebook, Google and Amazon, and FCC privacy regulations which lacked authority over the most egregious sources of concern about consumer privacy. We now see a major focus on antitrust from the FTC which hopefully isn’t coming just as AI makes much of this obsolete.

Media may just never figure out how to compete with Big Tech

Talk about a never-ending story. I’ve covered the emergence of Facebook as a “media company” (whether they wanted to admit it or not) in 2016 to efforts in 2017 by The New York Times and Washington Post to get antitrust regulators to help them battle the tech giants to the endless cannibalization of ad business growth by big tech, including the newest threat from Amazon Prime Video. Frenemies for the media business? Maybe just enemies – or future bosses.

Lessons pop up in unexpected places

As you might guess from this column, I’m always a sucker for business lessons wherever I can find them. I’ve uncovered lessons about unsung heroes we should always appreciate (from the fabulous music documentary The Wrecking Crew); what we can learn from our own family (the Brothers Clancy/Siefken from the worlds of theater, gaming and public television); what makes a great partnership (thank you Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga); and paying attention to the influencers – professional or not – all around us from teachers to friends. Here’s hoping for a lot more to learn and lot more to share.