Chinese firms enter top global media owners for first time
China’s national state television company and the main search engine in the region have entered ZenithOptimedia’s top thirty global media owners, the first time any company from China has done so. They join Brazil’s Globo as the only companies based in emerging markets on the list.
CCTV, which accounts for around a quarter of China’s TV ad market, made it to 23rd place – ahead of Facebook – whilst Baidu, the country’s equivalent of Google, came in at 28th place and beat Microsoft in the rankings.
Google, which is unable to operate in China, remains the top media owner in 2014, with revenues 47% higher than the second-largest, DirecTV. This gap has widened from 39% in last year’s report – largely due to the rise of mobile search, according the report’s authors.
Among the rest of the top five, DirecTV remains in second place and Comcast remains in fifth. Disney has overtaken News Corporation to take third place, after News Corporation split into two separate operations.
One of these – 21 st Century Fox – comes fourth in the ranking, while the new News Corporation is in twelfth place. Cox Enterprises has moved up from eighth to seventh, and BSkyB has risen from tenth to eighth. Bertelsmann has slipped from seventh to ninth, while CBS Corporation has dropped from ninth to tenth.
The Top Thirty Global Media Owners report is a ranking of the world’s largest media companies by media revenue, as estimated by ZenithOptimedia. The report was launched in 2007 and was last published by ZenithOptimedia in 2013. ZenithOptimedia defines media revenue as all revenue deriving from businesses that support advertising, not just the advertising revenue itself.
Most companies in the Top 30 have operations in more than one country, and many are truly international in scope with operations around the world. Only seven companies are essentially devoted to one market: Baidu, CCTV and Globo, plus Cox Enterprises in the US, and the three Japanese companies Asahi Shimbun Company, Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings and Fuji Media Holdings.
The arrival of Baidu means there are now five pure-play internet media owners in the Top 30, up from four last year: Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Baidu and Microsoft.
Between them they attract 67% of all global expenditure on internet advertising. This demonstrates how power in the internet ad market currently belongs to the intermediaries – companies that connect consumers with the content they’re looking for, or with each other – rather than to the content producers themselves.
These five intermediaries account for 21% of all media revenue generated by the Top 30 media owners.
“The arrival of CCTV and Baidu in our Top 30 list is testament to the size and dynamism of the Chinese market,” said Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at ZenithOptimedia.
“But we expect a much greater presence from emerging market media owners once they start to expand their international operations in earnest. The rise of the internet has created a new type of media owner – the intermediary – which generates its revenue by connecting consumers with contents and with each other.
“However, the production of compelling content lies at the heart of the media world, and content producers still dominate the Top 30.”
Main image: China’s national state television company headquarters in Beijing.