From here to the next election...
This chart show what’s going to happen to the newspaper business in the UK. Not that you couldn’t have guessed it on existing trends. The Mirror continues to lose readers and so Trinity Mirror’s share falls. The Mail titles (DMGT) hold steady. Meanwhile, over at Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell towers, the Star simply replaces market share lost by the Express. All of which leads to only one result…
…the share of circulation of the News Corp titles is projected to rise from 37.3 per cent today to 40.5 per cent by 2014.
There’s more. What happens if The Indy goes under, say. More market share gains for the big guys. What happens if Sky bundles The Sun or The Times with a Sky subscription (already discussed here) – then rivals get hit harder. Or as Claire Enders says: “Free editions and press and digital bundles for households could become critical developments for News Corp’s UK operations as a whole for the future”.
News Corp, in short, is already the 40 per cent player in British newspapers, outspending and outgrowing rivals. It is already the number one player in British television (see here for that analysis) with 80 per cent of pay television revenues and 16 per cent of TV advertising.
It may not be News’s fault that its competitors are all rubbish by comparison, but has the company reached the point of monopoly, where its success breeds more success? And where, over time, competing with News will become harder and harder.
Look how big News and Sky would be compared to the rest of British media:
Only BT is bigger, but it
