Happy Sunday Funday Peaceniks. Here’s the latest revised Media Universe Map.
I’ve been mapping the Media Universe for almost five years now. The x-axis of the infographic is the valuation of each company, based on publicly available valuations - predominantly market capitalizations and public share prices, but also reported valuations based on funds raised (OpenAI) or private share buybacks (ByteDance).
(If you want to look at the full history of these maps, from the first to the latest, you can always find them here.)
I make the map in powerpoint. While powerpoint is the easiest platform for a non-trained designer like myself to create this complicated chart, it is also the bane of my existence - a torturous, dysfunctional marriage of convenience, and the most emotionally damaging relationship in my life. That is why I use only lowercase when spelling powerpoint, degrading it to just a common noun.
However, despite offers to help me automate revisions to the map, I insist on continuing to do it by hand. First and foremost, while you may think this pretentious, I see this map as my artwork - an ongoing series of landscapes of the Media world in which we work and live. Searching and updating the data, and adjusting the planetary sizes of all 124 companies, by hand, each month immerses me in the ecosystem far more deeply than hitting a button and allowing some GenAI algorithm to do it for me. The details in this world are important. Noticing each one, myself, as they change each month, is what gives me the view you see.
Second, looking at these numbers in relation to each other, repeatedly, over time, shows clear and distinct patterns. The process reads trajectory with such a fine point, it often shows that what’s coming next is, in fact, happening right now. The work, even the suffering of powerpoint, is what gives me the insights I write in this space.
When I made the first map in 2020, including the massive Trillion-Dollar Death Stars in the same universe as the traditional media players, each sized only by their valuations, many who saw it called it an unfair comparison.
But the map was not intended simply to compare Big Tech and Big Media by value. That first map was designed to make one, specific point. It was drawn to show a conclusion: Big Tech had taken over Media.
This wasn’t a prediction. It was a pronouncement. YouTube was already the biggest video platform on the planet. Two companies, Apple and Alphabet, already controlled 100% of access to the world’s smartphone users. Amazon already had the second largest SVOD platform in the world. Google and Facebook (now Meta) back then controlled 50% of ad revenue in the US.
The data was clear: The future of Media would be an era dominated not by Big Media, but by Big Tech. And, laying the data out all in one space, showed very clearly: That future had already arrived.
This new map offers new patterns and trajectories, some of which are emerging, but many of which (if you focus on them) are happening in real time, now:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Media War & Peace to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.