ITV plc
A merger designed to dominate UK TV instead built too many studios and closed too many offices — proving scale without synergy is just overhead with a press release.
Advertising
The industry that pays for most of the culture and is rarely credited.
- 5
- in business
- 10:28
- average
- 52 min
- in total
- 77
- across the network
All briefs
RTL Group
Bertelsmann · 2000
RTL Group is a broadcast-first European media operator built through merger, not innovation. Its structure reflects regulatory fragmentation, not technological ambition.
Ted Turner
Turner didn’t build a media company — he built a regulatory arbitrage engine disguised as a broadcaster.
Meta Platforms
Mark Zuckerberg · 2004
Meta Platforms is a vertically integrated advertising monopoly masquerading as a metaverse infrastructure company. Its business model is simple and brittle: monetise attention at scale. Its strategy is contradictory: spend billions on speculative futures while refusing to decouple from surveillance-based ads. Its governance is absolute: Zuckerberg controls votes, vision, and compensation.
Yahoo Inc. (2017–present)
Jerry Yang & David Filo · 2006
Yahoo Inc. (2017–present) is not the original Yahoo!. It is a Delaware-incorporated media entity formed in 2006, acquired by Verizon in 2017 for $4.48 billion — reduced from $4.8 billion after two breaches affecting over a billion users. Verizon wrote down its combined AOL-Yahoo value by $4.6 billion in 2018 and rebranded it Verizon Media in 2019. In 2021, Apollo Global Management acquired 90% for $5 billion, reinstating the Yahoo name and appointing Jim Lanzone CEO. Its $7.4 billion 2020 revenue comes from advertising across vertically focused, high-traffic properties — but it has shed Tumblr, HuffPost, and AOL without replacing their scale or influence.