New York Times media columnist, David Carr, read an advance copy of The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong With the World’s Leading Media Companies.
He says the book maintains that in the aggregate since 2000, large media companies have written down $200 billion in value.
After more than 100 digital business deals since 2000, Sony, Time Warner, NBC Universal, Disney, Viacom and the News Corporation have mostly written down digital efforts that have not panned out.
According to the book, there is indeed a correlation between unrestrained growth and value — an inverse one. Often, the faster the top line grows, the worse the bottom line does, in part because media companies are too impatient to sensibly build from within and instead make acquisitions at prices that are determined as a multiple of ego, not revenue.
