Page 147 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

126 Critical investigations in political economy

as Google and Yahoo] has been good for advertisers who find new cheap
and direct routes to those they need to reach. It is also good for consumers,
providing them with free search, email … access to social networks, to
create and enjoy user-generated content and multiple other applications. But
what aggregators do not do in any quantity is fund the creation of long-form
professional content.
(DCMS/BERR 2009: 16–17)

Online advertising is also very unequally distributed. According to the Internet
Advertising Bureau in 2005, 72 per cent of web advertising flowed to the ten
most popular sites on the web. In fact the top fifty sites grabbed 95 per cent of
revenues, although the remaining 5 per cent share over which suppliers competed
was worth half a billion dollars.

Consumption and use
Media content companies compete with other Internet services and activities.
There is greater capacity to access media via personal mobile communications
and there is increasingly complex multiscreen usage amongst online users.
Consumption of traditional media, notably linear television, remains high. Yet
the growth of online gaming, e-commerce and social media indicates shifts in
consumer activity and time spent that pose challenges for ‘mass media’ content
services based on selling products to consumers, or selling consumers to adver-
tisers. The majority of adult time spend online is with social media. In 2012
American Internet users devoted more time to social media sites than any other
category, roughly 20 per cent on PCs and 30 per cent via mobiles, with Face-
book (152 million visitors via PC) far ahead of Blogger and Twitter as the most
visited site (Nielsen 2012).

Alternative content supply
Profit-making media companies are variously challenged by competition from
other supplies of ‘professional’ media, by ‘amateur’ content creation and by Pro-Am
hybridisations mixing both. In Europe, broadcasters have embarked on different
strategies to sustain public service media. These have been shaped by institu-
tional traditions, by technological innovation market conditions and by policies.
In Britain, a strong public service provider, the BBC, expanded online but has been
challenged, with some success, by commercial players who argue the BBC’s
‘free’ provision makes markets unviable for competitors.
There has been a significant expansion of ‘horizontal’ media content used for
interpersonal and intergroup communication. This challenges and displaces ‘old’
media in various ways, most notably in time spent consuming professional,
public ‘vertical’ media content. According to an Ofcom (2006: 11) survey
11 per cent of UK Internet users in June 2006 had a weblog or a web page, of