iMeme: What's a Media Company?

A “Giants of Online Media Panel,” moderated by Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, brought together executives from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and Ask.com to discuss what’s next. Each has different challenges. Google is the leader, needing to maintain its dominance. Yahoo has a large but comparatively undeveloped opportunity. Microsoft continues to try to grow market share. And though Ask has successfully established itself as a strong number four in the market, it operates at much lower traffic levels than its larger competitors.

Though Yahoo EVP Jeff Weiner said that his company is a place where its users spend about 13% of all their waking moments, he agrees there is still substantial work to be done. “We’ve got one of the largest dormant networks on the planet,” he admitted. “Our job is to activate that.” And he believes that Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder who recently re-took the reins of the company, is the right person to lead that charge. “I never worked at a company where the founder is the CEO,” he said. “It’s very energizing.”

A common perspective between all was the belief that there is tremendous opportunity for growth. “How much information are you going to be able to find through Google today? Today it’s tiny,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s VP of global sales and online operations. She believes that the company can significantly expand its role in supplying the information that people need throughout their day. “So we think there’s a long way for us to go. And we think of search as a small part of the market.”

On day two a “Future of Media” panel explored the future of media with Samir Arora, CEO of Glam Media, Michael Jackson, president of programming at IAC, Bruno Zheng Wu, chairman of Sun Media Investment, and Chris DeWolfe, co-founder of MySpace. Moderator Oliver Ryan of Fortune did a good job of setting up the importance of each panelist to the discussion.

There are many similarities between the “incumbents” – it’s an odd industry where a company like Yahoo is a grandfather at just 11 years old – and these “upstarts.” Arora, an impressive speaker whose company claims to be the top “destination” for women online, said that though his company gets about two thirds of its ad impressions from a network of partners, that’s actually very similar to Google’s revenue numbers.

Ryan asked the panelists to define what a media company is, and if Facebook should be categorized as a media company, despite what founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed the previous day. Arora made the distinction between an entertainment/education provider, and a utility company, as two different models of media companies, saying that Facebook was the latter. But the other panelists generally agreed that, because it’s a platform for user attention that sells ads, Facebook is indeed a media company.

Like the leading search companies, IAC’s Michael Jackson said that there remains tremendous opportunity for growth, with no opportunity for traditional media companies to lock up the market as has happened at different times in radio or television. “We look at this like Malibu before they started building the houses,” he said. “From now on, it’s forever going to be disruptive.”

Though Ryan did a good job of moderating the discussion – and categorizations like Arora’s give some pointers to where entrepreneurs might focus – what was missing was any discussion about how companies truly differentiate in the current market, and if the dynamics of media companies are now set. I don’t think they are: Though the basics remain the same (aggregate attention, sell ads) the process continues to change, with the user increasingly in charge – as DeWolfe pointed out – with the opportunity to continually change the rules.

gB