The packaging might change but the desire for information and entertainment remains the same, and media companies are dealing with the rise of an unprecedented number of disruptive business models and technological innovations.
The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 is regarded as the most influential event in the past 1,000 years, while the use of semiconductors and the internet to produce, store and distribute information has transformed the media industry at the start of the third millennium.
The potential of the internet and digital media led to a wave of venture investment in the 1990s, culminating in the technology media and telecom bubble around the millennium.
For example, Reuters, which ran one of the most successful venturing units, the Greenhouse fund, was already by the mid-1990s delivering all its products on an information technology platform via its newswires and terminal. It was among the first group of companies whose products were remade by web 1.0.
A number of companies, including Bertelsman with its proposed $1bn eBertelsmann fund, AOL Time Warner which announced a $500m fund, and News Corp in a joint venture with Softbank in the eVentures group, set up or ran large corporate venting units during this first period (see table at bottom of article).
At the height of the so-called dot.com bubble during this period, a host of other media companies either spun off their venturing units, including Thomson to form Neo-Carta and Times Mirror to set up Rustic Canyon Group, or became limited partners in specialist funds, such as Media Technology Ventures, which raised its third fund of $165m only from corporations.
Following the bursting of the dot.com bubble, after 2001 a number of the venturing units were sold, such as Reuters’ Greenhouse fund, or quietly moved away from taking minority stakes in third parties, including Kaplan’s, as optimism over the financial returns from the impact of the internet and digital media production and distribution gave way to pessimism.
However, the long-term growth in the media industry and evolution of its structure has continued.
There was a 14-fold increase in the US media industry to $1 trillion last year from $63bn in 1975 while nominal gross domestic productrose 8.5-fold in this period, according to private equity firm VeronisSuhler Stevenson (VSS) using its Historical Database.
The amount of time people spent with media also rose during this period by 700 hours to 3,532 hours per person in 2009, up from 2,843 hours in 1975, VSS added.
The increased consumption of media came alongside a "dramatic increase in leisure time" between 1963 and 2003, according to research by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst in a paper, Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades, for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston published in 2006.
During this period, the paper said leisure for men increased by 7.9 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by six hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours).
By 2008, Americans aged at least 15 years slept about 8.6 hours, spent 5.2 hours doing leisure and sports activities, worked for 3.7 hours, and spent 1.7 hours doing household activities, according to the American Time Use Survey on behalf of the US Bureau of Labor.
Part of this leisure time went on watching more subscription television. This segment of the entertainment and leisure industry was the fastest-growing and largest communications division from 1975 to 2009, expanding at a 15.5% compound annual growth rate to $155.1bn, according to VSS.
However, the growth of digital services, such as videogames, internet and mobile services, accounted for almost 50% of the 3,532 hours the average American spent with consumer media last year, the private equity firm said. This growth is providing investment opportunities.
Richard Sarnoff, president of Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI), a corporate venturing division of Germany-based media group Bertelsman, in a statement said: "As digital media, the web and mobile access continue to converge on a global scale, we seek to partner with pioneering companies developing new technologies, new business models or new visions of the future."
With more than 100,000 employees, Bertelsmann is one of the world’s largest media groups and also operates Freemantle Media Ventures under its television subsidiary RTL.
However, as with a number of other media groups, such as Washington Post Company’s education subsidiary Kaplan, Bertelsmann has had a number of iterations within venturing, including Random House Ventures for its book publisher and an incubator, Venturepark.
The launch of BDMI in 2006 moved Sarnoff from being president of Random House Ventures, which he had helped launch in 2000. BDMI was launched at the same time Dow Jones, just before its acquisition by News Corp, set up a Ventures division under president Ann Sarnoff, while industrial conglomerate General Electric, in a joint venture with its television network subsidiary NBC, set up a $200m fund, Peacock Equity, in 2007.
Despite the credit crunch, new media venturing units have continued to be set up, with Paul Lee, one of the Peacock fund’s founders, joining Playboy Enterprises as managing director of new digital ventures, including its venture fund, in May.
In March, internet services company AOL formally announced the establishment of its AOL Ventures fund after splitting from Time Warner, which also has a successful venturing unit.
Mike Brown, co-founder AOL Ventures, said the firm had always had a principal investment operation and its latest fund was focused on making non-strategic seed and series A
investments in early stage consumer internet companies.
He said: "we’re excited to be a part of the early stage ecosystem and are really structuring the fund this time around to be more like a traditional VC with carried interest [performance fees], the ability to move fast with committed capital and a singular focus on partnering with the best entrepreneurs and helping give them the unfair advantage they need to succeed."
Other media groups, such as Anglo-Dutch publisher Reed Elsevier, US broadcaster Comcast and Walt Disney, have been more consistent in their venture structure and team.
John Ball, founder and managing director of Steamboat Ventures, one of the media sector’s largest and most sophisticated venture investors as the $600m corporate venturing division of Walt Disney, formed the unit in the late 1990s due in part to the increasing emergence of technology-enabled, disruptive business models in the media business, including Napster and Tivo.
These two examples of technologydriven innovation challenged existing business models in the music publication and network television industries respectively.
Ball said: "We viewed Napster and Tivo as the tip of the iceberg. Major media companies faced the choice of engaging proactively with the new wave of technology-driven innovation and influencing its applications, or being reactive and threatened by it.
"There has subsequently been a huge increase in the number of opportunities to back disruptive technology and their rate of entrepreneurial innovation in the media industry has increased dramatically.
"The time taken for leading webenabled platforms and applications to reach significant scale has in many ways steadily decreased, from Microsoft to Google to Youtube to Facebook.
"Now social gaming companies, such as Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and CrowdStar have, in only 24 months or so, gone from collective revenues of about $100m to more than $1bn, while also demonstrating healthy profitability.
"Companies are getting bigger, faster and the viral nature of the media landscape means success can be almost instantaneous and propagate very quickly."
In July, Disney agreed to acquire Playdom to access social gaming, the first instance of Disney acquiring a Steamboat portfolio company. Given the rapidly changing media landscape, it is possible that major media companies will further increase their acquisition activity in emerging, high-growth segments of the market, media executives said.
Disney is also an investor alongside News Corp and GE in video-sharing network Hulu, started in 2007 and now with a reportedly more than $100m in revenues.
This success is often global and the source of the innovation can come from anywhere in the world. The globalisation of the media industry from the 1980s led to transnational, mostly US-based media groups, where overseas income has increased in importance – Walt Disney, the world’s largest media group, earned about 15% of its revenue outside the US in 1990 and this had doubled in less than a decade.
However, the two biggest and most influential venturing groups in the media sector to have emerged over the past two decades have specifically targeted developing economies, according to a ranking by Global Corporate Venturing.
Naspers, a South Africa-based media company, and US computer publisher International Data Group’s (IDG) venture units have invested billions of dollars in acquiring minority stakes in media companies in emerging markets. IDG has committed more than $1bn to its general partnerships (GP) across the US, Europe and primarily Asia, and their success has attracted other limited partners to the fund.
IDG’s largest venture capital division, IDG Capital Partners in China, has $2.5bn under management and a partnership with US-based top-tier independent venture capital firm Accel Partners in the country. IDG’s success in China, under Hugo Shong and Quan Zhou, and across Asia and the US has followed close connections between the parent and venture operations.
Shong, president of IDG Asia and the first managing partner of IDG Capital in China, said: "IDG’s magazines and trade shows have been complementary to the venture team and very helpful at that time, and part of our success has come from staying very close to the core technology and internet market."
The IDG dealflow template provides "the real leverage for success" with the company’s data being used initially to identify target sectors, and then its journalists, editors and analysts referring deal opportunities and helping with due diligence.
If a deal is struck, the portfolio company and its products gain "positioning with editors and analysts" and a 65% discount on IDG advertising, products and services, according to a copy of the template on the company’s website.
However, Patrick McGovern, founder and chairman of IDG, said the company acted as a limited partner once the local general partner had been set up with a structure and incentive scheme used by most independent VCs. He said: "IDG made the terms of incentives for the China GP the same as any other independent VC: 20% of capital gains above a benchmark, such as inflation, and 2.5% annual management fee. This has meant that in 18 years there has been almost no turnover of senior staff because there have been very high rates of capital appreciation and comparable reward.
"Each country’s GP decides on strategy and investments. Only at the very beginning, the first year, did I personally visit several times and have the China team send the business plans, but they were cut loose after that."
For Naspers, when Koos Bekker was made chief executive he declined a salary or pension in favour of stock.
Naspers’ global expansion and strategic focus on growing segments of the media industry, primarily subscription-TV and the internet, have made its South Africa’s largest media company and the only one of the four publishers at the time apartheid was lifted to have survived intact.
However, while a number of firms have launched or expanded their direct investment teams, others, such as Canada-listed Thomson Reuters and Germany-based publisher Hubert Burda Media have moved to acting as an investor in venture funds.
Thomson is a limited partner in the independently-managed BlackBerry Partners fund, while Burda spun off its successful ecommerce venture capital division to form Acton Capital Partners in 2008.
Burda remains a limited partner in Acton’s latest €150m ($190m) fund, Heureka Growth, that closed earlier this year, and the investment team still manages the remaining investments from the BDV fund launched in 1999. Burda decided to spin off Acton to allow the group to invest in larger deals.
Nikolaus van der Decken, Burda’s spokesman, said: "For many years, Burda invested as a venture capitalist in startups. These investments were in a range below €10m. This market is not attractive any more. First, today’s start-ups need significantly less [money] and, second, there [are] hardly any opportunities. This is why Burda closed its venture capital funds [and] Acton was founded.
"[Acton] concentrates on investments in established middle-sized digital companies. These investments are higher (range of €20m) [and Acton’s] businesses do not relate to media. In order to get other investors in it makes more sense to separate Acton from Burda."
Top five media company fund launches in 1999
Corporation Size ($m)
Time Warner 500
News Corp 300
Comcast 250
Reader’s Digest Association 100
Freedom Communications 10
Source: The Corporate Venturing Directory & Yearbook