Putting steemit into perspective: 90% of US media is controlled by six companies
Doing my daily research I found this article on wikipedia. I was not aware of the following facts until today.
This shocked me:
In 1983, 90% of US media was controlled by fifty companies; today, 90% is controlled by just six companies.
quoted from Business Insider, June 14 2012
The 'Big Six' companies are (2014 revenues in brackets):
- Comcast ($69 billion)
- The Walt Disney Company ($48.8 billion)
- 21st Century Fox ($40.5 billion )
- Time Warner ($22.8 billion)
- Viacom ($13.7 billion)
- CBS Corporation ($13.8 billion)
This is not what pluralistic media should look like in my opinion. It's terrible.
But the good thing is: Looking at the current revenues of media companies and comparing them to the market cap of steemit we can state: Steemit has a bright future. There are lots of things to come. This is just the beginning of a revolution in decentralization and uncensored information going mainstream. It will grow a lot. We all can be proud of being part of this revolution. We are the pioneers that fight centralization and censorship. We are the early-adopters of steemit. We have just started to make the world a better place!
That bit of unexpected news brightens the day. Hopefully we can reverse that monopolization.
That said, those firms are all USA - surely the rest of the planet has some presence?
Yes it's more like an oligopoly. What shame that actually just a few people control everything.
Into this positivity and totally agree with you! :)
Now put the information about the media control into perspective and transform it into steemit analogy and you get: 6 Whales Control What 90% of People See on Steemit... (on the trending page) :)
Well. Definitely a problem. I already wrote a post about this https://steemit.com/steemit/@crypt0mine/steemit-whales-successful-blogs-and-the-joshua-bell-phenomenon
Let me quote myself: 'It's more like you have a 30 min timeframe in which a whale upvotes you or you will be lost in the deep ocean of steemit. Possibly never seen again [...]. On steemit it is not about 'people' but whales who do the real curating? You need a whale. A whale that induces activity on you post. [...]