concentration of online news industry

HMF is making me really really dizzy, so I decided to start with Picard's piece then a little on HMF…

If we wish to measure market concentration or measure the degree of market competitions, both according to HMF and Picard, what we need to do first is to define our industry (market) and identify firms that comprise the industry. For a news Web site, name it MSNBC or nytimes.com, what is the industry and which companies comprise the industry? Can they answer this question or can we answer this question (I cannot……)?

Picard argued there is seldom direct competition among media, such as newspaper versus newspaper, but different media compete with each other for audience time and expenditure (p. 139). Competition among and between media can be understood as: intermedia competition and intramedia competition. These two take place simultaneously, and I guess this is one of the reasons why we find so hard to define the industry of online news.

To define online news industry, we can first start with U.S. based English news Web sites. Then second, in terms of intramedia competition, we include all U.S. traditional news media (TV, print, radio, etc). Third, in terms of intrmedia competition, we include all U.S. based new Web sites, which are countless. Fourth, we cannot ignore portal sites (in PEW's 2008 news audience survey, Yahoo was name the most frequently visited news site, p.22). And fifth, if the competition is for news users' time, how should we account for multitasking?

Here are the top eight most frequently visited news Web sites from Pew's news audience survey
Yahoo—28%
MSN/Microsoft—19%
CNN—17%
Google—11%
MSNBC/NBC—10%
AOL—8%
Fox—7%
NYT—4%
Local news Web site—4%
(other Web sites are 2% or lower)

But if we look at online news only at this point and ignore the traditional media (TV, print, radio) just for a second, using Pew's data, we can roughly see how concentrated online news industry is (even though it is survey data instead of industry data). Adding up the percentage of the second table on p.22 of Pew's report, it is added up to 122% because multiple responses by a user were accepted. Adding up the percentages of the first four (from yahoo to MSNBC), we have 57%. If we manipulate the numbers proportionately, we have CR4=49.72 (122%: 57% = 100%: 49.72%). Using the same method, CR8 would roughly be 65.57%. We have both CR4 and CR8 for online news to be moderately concentrated. They are higher than the CR4 (42%) and CR8 (48%) of print newspapers Albarran and Dommick have in our HMF text p.147. What does this mean is… this moderate (or almost highly concentrated for CR4) concentrated online news industry is consistent with oligopoly I guess?