Media Conglomates and Ownership

Adam Reakes
COM 103
MW 12:00-1:15

Understanding the business and economic side of media messages: Media ownership and Conglomerates

You might not be surprised to know that Disney is the largest media conglomerate in the world. Its yearly revenue exceeds $38 billion. Joining them at the top of media companies are News Corporation, Google and CBS. (Time Magazine) It is an incredible bit of viewing to see the numbers thrown around at these sorts of companies. I can think of the day I first saw Disney World in Florida and it never fails to astound me when I think of the great scale of the place and that is just a portion of the company. I’m going to focus on Google. Google is the big “new media” company. Google has its hand in every main Internet company out there. The blog that I use for my Communications class is owned and run by Google. Google has 30 subsidiary companies in the USA alone. The top 3 being @Last Software Inc. Android Inc. and Applied Semantics Inc. with all being heavy-hitters in the internet game.

So what do these aspects of the media now hold? They are more accessible now for us as users. With one Google account I can access many different websites without having to sign up or register multiple times. YouTube for example is a huge company on the internet and is an acquisition of Google and is linked with Google account, so I can use YouTube with another account setup. Personally, I think it’s a great idea to have and Google’s “greed” of wealth, is actually a very useful tool. Another company who own a strong collection of subsidiary companies is Viacom. Viacom own a lot of the entertainment TV channels and broadcast to over 60 million people a day. (Viacom International report on leechon.com)From a business point of view is incredible outreach and can only be good for the company.

People who argue that this is not good for the media growth as a whole, I must disagree. If one company has one idea but places that idea into 45 different boxes, it’s got more of a chance of reaching further corners of the earth. Business is about growth and development after all. Why stop the big companies from expanding and creating more profit? Especially if it makes it easier for us as consumers.

An interesting section of the internet from Wall Street Journal reports that Google is planning to expand even further to south-east Asia. Google will be opening up a new office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which will be their first new office in the Asia region in four years. Google’s president, Japan and Asia-Pacific operations, Daniel Alegre said “We’re seeing a tremendous amount of growth in Southeast Asia. Malaysia has very high mobile penetration … and most of the Internet users that are coming online will probably start to interact with the Internet through mobile phones rather than PCs.”

So looking at this as a whole and summarising, I can deter that companies are expanding or planning to expand, it is the way media works. Companies know we are using other means of technology to find our news, resources or to socialise. For example, Google has “ebooks” which has a wide selection of Books, as the name suggests, and can be accessed by anyone. Times are changing, so are companies and so must we.