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The Medium delivers in-depth analyses of the media marketplace’s transformation as creators, tech companies and 10 million emerging advertisers revolutionize the business models for “premium content”.

Each fiscal quarter, The Medium identifies three or four new trends that have momentum and seem poised to play out at a larger scale in 2023. These key trends pinpoint dynamic and constantly evolving developments in the media marketplace that are emerging from incremental shifts or fundamental changes. The bi-weekly mailings analyze these trends as developments emerge in real-time. 

Read the three key trends The Medium will be focused on in Q4 2023. This essay focuses on "In the shift from wholesale to retail models, there are many business models that delight consumers but no single, dominant one."

Outside of Disney (Parks and Cruises) or NBCUniversal (Universal Theme Parks), we do not often hear about the overlap between the media and travel and leisure industries. Sports betting has changed this dynamic casino brands like MGM and Caesars have been moving into the space. 

Arguably the most notable example has been Penn Entertainment closing an acquisition of media company Barstool Sports for around $500 million this past February to launch a sports betting service. It shortly thereafter sold it back to Barstool founder Dave Portnoy for $1 and a long list of contractual covenants because regulatory obstacles related to Portnoy had become too expensive to resolve. At the end of 2023, Barstool is now out of the sports betting business, and Penn has pivoted to Disney’s ESPN as a partner for “ESPN Bet”, which has had a strong launch with app downloads since last week.

The other example of the overlap was laid out in an August 2020 letter to shareholders from IAC CEO Joey Levin outlining a $1 billion investment in MGM Resorts. Levin argued that MGM Resorts was unusually well-positioned to succeed in sports betting because it then had over 35 million registered members of its M-Life Rewards program—which has since been rebranded to “MGM Rewards”—and its ecosystem mirrored “Disney’s advantages over pure-play streaming companies with an iconic brand and multiple avenues to monetize the same intellectual property between streaming, theatrical releases, merchandise, and theme parks.”

As longtime readers remember, that sentence was the foundation of the PARQOR Hypothesis, an original and proprietary framework for identifying which media companies are best positioned for success in streaming. The premise is that those companies who centralize the value of their intellectual property and monetize it in multiple ways with audiences at scale will succeed.

It has not played out that way, to date, for either Disney or NBCUniversal. I learned in Las Vegas last weekend that this has not played out for MGM Resorts and IAC, either, despite its stock price now being over 2x the price when IAC invested. The question is why that is, and I think two key pieces of the answer lie in changing consumer demand for IP and consumer product design in sports betting.

Key Takeaway

In these fast-changing times the consumer relationship to flywheels seems to be weaker. Solving for consumer-savvy means questioning the strength of the consumer relationship with the brand. Solving for tech-savvy means delivering more consumer-centric products. 

Total words: 1,600

Total time reading: 7 minutes