Yahoo Finance Millennials have a new suitor
Comcast (CMCSA) apparently has a new plan to reach cord-cutting Millennials-- use someone else!
The Wall Street Journal says the company’s NBCUniversal division has held preliminary talks to make deals with several online publishers including Business Insider, BuzzFeed and Vice Media. In addition, the paper says the company has discussed increasing its approximately 14% stake in Vox Media.
The idea would be to deliver the “old media” company’s content via these “new media” sites.
Yahoo Finance Columnist Rick Newman can only laugh at this.
“Here we have old guys in suits trying to figure out how to reach young people,” he jokes. “This is a typical corporate effort to reach people who aren’t interested in any kind of corporate messages or corporate product.”
However, Newman points out Comcast and its rivals really don’t have a choice.
“Comcast and other cable providers have to be looking at all kinds of options to figure out how to catch up with this trend of people basically blowing off their product,” he explains. “They’re losing customers because their product is just not organized in a way that people want to buy it these days.”
Still, Newman isn’t so sure this plan by Comcast is really the best way to go.
“I’m skeptical whenever you get a big corporate effort to take a startup-- which is cool because it is a startup and it’s cool because it doesn’t play by the rules and it’s not corporatized yet-- and then bring it into the corporate fold,” he adds.
Yahoo Finance’s Aaron Task agrees.
“The history of established media companies buying younger media companies and a conglomeration of media companies, typically those don’t work out,” he notes.
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Newman says it’s interesting that Comcast might be courting companies that in the beginning were not exactly taken very seriously.
“When some of those media sites started up, there was a fair amount of skepticism about them,” he points out. “It seemed like they were 'nichefying' niches by saying we’re going to package it in this way and that way.”
But as Newman explains, that mentality has changed, much to the benefit of those who launched those startups.
“These sites have clearly caught on,” he notes. “And you can sort of see the investor rationale at this point, which is if you can establish a ‘cool factor’ on the internet and then attract interest from deep-pocketed corporate America, that’s a pretty good business model and your ‘exit,’ as they say in startup land.”
And Newman believes if Comcast and others succeed in absorbing the current media “disruptors,” that might just lead to the creation of even more.
“It makes you wonder if some of these new media sites become part of the corporate media landscape, does that open up room for even newer media startups?” he asks. “I think it does.”
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