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Chart: The Slow Death of Traditional Media

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Chart: The Slow Death of Traditional Media

The Slow Death of Traditional Media

Desperation time as old guard clings to falling market share

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Bill Gates once famously said that we systematically overestimate the change that will occur in two years, while underestimating the change that will come in the next ten.

The ongoing conversation about the death of legacy media definitely fits that mold.

Over the last five to ten years, people have been talking about how the newspaper, magazine, or radio station would become all but obsolete. And while certainly things have changed in all of these industries, it’s clear that there has not been a full paradigm shift yet.

Here is the evidence that we have finally reached that inflection point.

Fixing the Plane

In a recent interview at the City University of New York’s journalism school, Ken Lerer described the challenges of traditional media as follows:

You have to fix the plane while you’re flying it.

Lerer, a co-founder of the Huffington Post and currently the Chairman for Buzzfeed, is alluding to the fact that legacy media has to maintain old business models based on subscription and print ad revenue, while successfully venturing into the digital world. The latter category is already hard enough, even without taking into account the balancing act of the former.

The moral of the story? Some of these “planes” are going to land safely, but most of them are going to crash and burn.

The cost structure of legacy media just doesn’t make sense in today’s digital world. Overhead is high, and revenue is harder to find due to the limited success of paywalls, rampant ad blocking, and the steady fall in display ad prices due to the emergence of programmatic bidding.

Legacy Revenues

Why has legacy media been so slow to adopt change? Why don’t they just lay off half of their staff, ditch print operations, and start from scratch?

It’s because their major revenue sources are as slow at adopting as they are.

In 2015, there was only one age demographic with more than half of its constituents reading a daily newspaper, and that was “65 years old and up”:

Daily Readership of Newspapers

That said, the people that still read newspapers are among the wealthiest people in the country. Warren Buffett, for example, reads five a day. But even he does not know how to save the print industry from its woes.

Meanwhile, Madison Avenue has been notoriously slow at evolving to meet the needs of the digital revolution. If the biggest advertisers are still demanding the status quo, it makes it very difficult to “fix the plane”.

New Models

The most noticeable signal of change, however, is the relative success of new media companies such as Vice, Buzzfeed, and Vox – and the fact that some of their largest backers are from the old guard.

All of the above companies are “unicorns” valued at $1 billion or more by private investors, which include venture capital stalwarts such as Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures, or Lerer Hippeau.

More importantly, however, they’ve also posted strategic investments from legacy media companies that are trying to wisely hedge their bets. Some of these include NBC Universal, The Walt Disney Company, 21st Century Fox, and Hearst.

Digital will become the largest channel for ad revenue globally by 2019 – investors and companies that believe in the media business should position themselves accordingly.

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Markets

Will Tesla Lose Its Spot in the Magnificent Seven?

We visualize the recent performance of the Magnificent Seven stocks, uncovering a clear divergence between the group’s top and bottom names.

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Will Tesla Lose Its Spot in the Magnificent Seven?

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

In this graphic, we visualize the year-to-date (YTD) performance of the “Magnificent Seven”, a leading group of U.S. tech stocks that gained prominence in 2023 as the replacement of FAANG stocks.

All figures are as of March 12, 2024, and are listed in the table below.

RankCompanyYTD Change (%)
1Nvidia90.8
2Meta44.3
3Amazon16.9
4Microsoft12
5Google0.2
6Apple-6.7
7Tesla-28.5

From these numbers, we can see a clear divergence in performance across the group.

Nvidia and Meta Lead

Nvidia is the main hero of this show, setting new all-time highs seemingly every week. The chipmaker is currently the world’s third most valuable company, with a valuation of around $2.2 trillion. This puts it very close to Apple, which is currently valued at $2.7 trillion.

The second best performer of the Magnificent Seven has been Meta, which recently re-entered the trillion dollar club after falling out of favor in 2022. The company saw a massive one-day gain of $197 billion on Feb 2, 2024.

Apple and Tesla in the Red

Tesla has lost over a quarter of its value YTD as EV hype continues to fizzle out. Other pure play EV stocks like Rivian and Lucid are also down significantly in 2024.

Meanwhile, Apple shares have struggled due to weakening demand for its products in China, as well as the company’s lack of progress in the artificial intelligence (AI) space.

Investors may have also been disappointed to hear that Apple’s electric car project, which started a decade ago, has been scrapped.

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