Add Astral and QMI, and the number rises to over 90 per cent. And remember those 700 TV channels referred to above? Fewer than 200 are actually up and running and more than half of them belong to Bell (28), Shaw (52), Rogers (17) and QMI (13) (see here).
And those 94 daily newspapers? Only a third are publishing original content on a daily basis. Competition has never flourished in the newspaper sector since 1984, with the share of the top four rising from two-thirds then to three-quarters in 1996 – a level that has stayed steady since, with periodic shuffling among players in the ranks.
Magazines are the least concentrated, with levels falling by one-half to about 20 per cent since 1984. Radio is still concentrated by standard measures, but only slightly so.
Combining all of the segments of the network media (except wired and wireless because their size overshadows everything else), the big four’s share of the mediascape has risen steadily: Bell (CTV), Shaw (Global), Rogers (CityTV), QMI (TVA). In 1984, the big four accounted for 40 per cent of all revenues; in 2010, their share was 54 per cent – a far bigger slice of a much bigger pie.
Add these four massive media conglomerates with six other large but more specialized firms and you have the big ten companies at the core of the network media economy: Bell (CTV), Shaw (Global), Rogers (CityTV), QMI (TVA), CBC, Post Media, Cogeco, Astral, Telus and Torstar (see here). Their share of the total network media economy (excluding telecoms services) between 2000 and 2010 hovered steadily around 70-75 per cent – a substantial rise from 63 per cent in 1996, and further still from 53 per cent in 1984.
The overall trajectory is one of falling concentration in the 1980s and early 1990s, before levels climbed sharply and settled in at all time high plateaus around 1996-2000, where things stayed relatively steady since until rising significantly in the last two years (C4). The following chart shows the trends for the top one, four and ten players across all media.
Top 1, 4 and 10 Players’ Share of the Market, 1984 – 2010
And for all those who continue to fantasize that the Internet is an oasis of free spirits and competitive markets, consider the following:
Google’s dominance of the search engine marking is growing, accounting for 81 per cent of searches in 2010 versus Microsoft (6.8 per cent), Yahoo! (5 per cent), and Ask.com (4 per cent). With a CR4 of 97, this is extremely concentrated.
Facebook accounted for 63.2 per cent of time spent on social media sites last year, trailed by Google’s YouTube (20.4 per cent), Microsoft (1.2 per cent), Twitter (0.7 per cent), and MySpace (0.6 per cent) Again, with a CR4 of 86 per cent, concentration is very high.
Time spent on the top ten websites nearly doubled from 20 to 38 per cent between 2003 and 2008, and most top 15 online news sites are arms of established media.
Top four web browsers – Microsoft’s Explorer (52.8 per cent), Google’s Chrome (17.7 per cent), Firefox (17.1 per cent) and Apple’s Safari (3 per cent) – had a market share of over 90 per cent.
Top four smartphone operating system makers had a 93 per cent share of the U.S. market last year: Google’s Android OS (29 per cent), Apple’s iOS (27 per cent), RIM (27 per cent) and Microsoft’s Windows 7 (10 per cent) (equivalent Canadian data not available).
So, does this mean that a massive trust-busting effort on the digital media frontier is in order? Maybe, but things will not turn on brute data by any means, since discussions about media concentration are in many ways a proxy for our views about politics and democracy. Ultimately, besides needing better data and a good airing of the issues, we need to get over the idea that we live in a digital nirvana where the laws of capitalism no longer apply.
Dwayne Winseck is a communications professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University in Ottawa. Prof. Winseck been researching and writing about media, telecoms and the Internet in one way or another for nearly 20 years. He most recently edited The Political Economies of Media. You can read more comment on his blog, Mediamorphis. His column will appear every second Tuesday.
