Through the internet, digitalisation and electronic devices, the media industry is giving people the opportunity to meet these needs faster and more broadly than ever.
This change brings upheaval, with the marriage of new and old media groups, such as the short-lived merger of AOL and Time Warner, fraught with risks. It is, however, hard to fail in the media business if you provide stories about people who pick themselves up after a setback and make something of their lives.
The survival and success of South Africa’s Naspers – Global Corporate Venturing’s most influential media group for its Myriad International Holdings subsidiary – is astonishing.
From being one of four main publishers in South Africa under apartheid, and closely identified with part of the white minority, Naspers has thrived after restrictions were lifted and universal elections held for the first time in 1994.
Naspers’ diversification into subscription television and then the internet through global expansion has been dogged with false or shaky starts. But its conviction that change was coming and had to be grasped for survival has seen Naspers’ revenues and profitability rise over the past 15 years even as its original rivals have been subsumed.
The consistent leadership of Naspers’ chairman and chief executive, Ton Vosloo and Koos Bekker respectively, has been instrumental and most of its senior executives have been at the company for decades. This consistency is often behind the success of the other influential media corporate venturing units.
International Data Group, led by legendary entrepreneur Pat McGovern as chairman, has been one of the world’s largest and most successful venture units, with more than $3.5bn under management.
The hires of Quan Zhou and Hugo Shong for its fledgling $50m IDG Capital venture fund in China in 1993 has led to excellent returns – Zhou is regarded as China’s John Doerr, the phenomenally successful successful venture capitalist at US-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
The returns and close connections with IDG’s computer publishing and analysis business has helped both sides and provided a model for venturing other media groups have struggled to replicate.
But as with any asset management business, timing and investment decision-making, are important skills and, along with luck, can make the difference between venture success and failure.
Sitting out the tail end of the dot.com boom before making a first investment has given Steamboat Ventures, Walt Disney’s venturing organisation, and Reed Elsevier Ventures, part of the Anglo-Dutch publisher, top-tier returns over the past decade and a string of successes.
That Walt Disney is now the world’s largest media group after its transformation since the mid-1980s means its actions are watched more closely than ever. Disney’s first acquisition of a Steamboat portfolio company, Playdom, shows up the importance of social gaming and the wider networks as a platform for media content production and delivery.
It is no surprise that Naspers has also invested heavily in the area, originally through one of the world’s greatest investments, in China’s Tencent, and then, via its holding in Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, into Facebook.
The media industry has been one where co-opetition – the amalgamation of cooperation and competition – has allowed groups to collaborate in some markets or technologies, from joint ownership of printing presses or newspaper delivery services, and battle in others.
As John Taysom, former manager of Reuters’ Greenhouse fund, angel investor and chairman of Global Corporate Venturing, points out in a comment, companies are following a Russian doll-style investment strategy, where one part fits within another.
So even as the media industry changes and continues to grow, there remain the same challenges of producing content people want in the most effective way.