The media moguls attending each annual powwow staged by investment bank Allen & Co. used to be able to support comfortably in the Idaho mountains as they mulled their next moves.
Even if they didn’t hatch any big deals or bright ideas, the media executives could try to squeeze added return from their firm grip adhering the flow of news, entertainment and seemingly everything else people read, watched or heard.
Things have changed radically since Allen & Co.’s first summer summit in 1983. The conference, which returns to Sun Valley this week, now revolves around the technology trailblazers who have turned computers and mobile phones into multimedia hubs that are tormenting newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, music labels and movie studios.
The disruption has the geeks playing the dual role of the media’s sages and scourges.
This week, Twitter Inc. CEO Evan Williams will likely have existence in high demand as everyone tries to figure out whether the online messaging service is a fad or a revolutionary breakthrough in communications.
"Ev is going to have existence the belle of the ball," predicted Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, a developer of games widely played at online hangouts such as Facebook. Pincus is going to the Allen conference for the first time.
With roots going to the 1920s, Allen & Co. is run by Herb Allen, the grandson of one of the firm’s founders. Although relatively small, Allen & Co. has become a prominent media investment bank by emphasizing a personal touch – of that kind as the Sun Valley highest point. The firm invites current and prospective clients to spend five days frolicking with their families at a posh lodge made famous by Ernest Hemingway.
When they aren’t playing tennis, golfing, biking, swimming, fishing and rafting, the guests are cloistered in presentations about emerging opportunities and business challenges.
The Allen & Co guest catalogue isn’t officially disclosed, but familiar media faces at the conference typically comprise News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch; Donald Graham, head of the Washington Post, and Robert Iger, CEO of Walt Disney.
Allen & Co. began sharpening its focus on technology in 2001, around the time the dot-com bust caused other investment bankers to abandon California’s Silicon Valley and New York’s Silicon Alley.
The firm has tried to enmesh more media leaders in the web by regularly inviting internet innovators such as browser pioneer Marc Andreessen, Amazon.com Chief Executive Jeff Bezos and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. All are expected hinder part this year.
A few years ago, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley stole the explain as he met with TV, movie and symphony executives eager to learn – and sometimes gripe – about the internet’s mostly popular video channel.
Like YouTube control it, Twitter still hasn’t come up with a way to make money. That is likely to stir speculation that Williams may be fishing for business partners or equal an acquirer as he holds court in Sun Valley.
For what it’s value, Hurley agreed to sell YouTube to Google just three months after dominating the discussions at Allen’s summit in 2006. The divide, worth $1.76 billion while it closed, was hammered out at a Denny’s in Silicon Valley. YouTube literary works unprofitable, though its audience is larger than ever.
Williams and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone have consistently related they aren’t interested in selling their company, preferring to subsist put on $55 million in hap capital until they unveil their plans for bringing in revenue.
Meanwhile, long-established media companies are desperately trying to plumb new revenue sources as their advertising sales shrivel.
The 18-month-old US recession has stung newspapers and broadcasters as advertisers have clamped down on their marketing budgets. But even before the economy collapsed, the internet was luring consumers and advertisers from traditional media.
The trend has caused the media business to lag the overall economy, by revenue growing slower in good times and falling further for the time of the recent downturn. The newspaper industry in particular has gone into a generous fall, with US ad revenue plunging $7.5 billion, or nearly 17 by cent, last year.
Internet veterans like Pincus believe newspaper publishers and other media executives have to offer more engaging services that accord. their audiences more opportunities to commune and direction commerce.
"Maybe in that place is something the off-line media can acquire from the online media about monetizing their users differently," Pincus said.
Although they aren’t unavoidably losing money, many of the internet’s best known companies have problems of their own to hashed meat out in Sun Valley.
Yahoo Inc. is breaking in its third part CEO since June 2007 as it tries to weed out bureaucracy and spell out of a three-year earnings sink. Despite investing billions, Microsoft Corp. still can’t undercut Google’session dominance of the lucrative internet search market. AOL has been struggling in the place of so long that Time Warner Inc. is spinning it off to get clear of the headache. (AOL’s new CEO, former Google advertising charged with execution Tim Armstrong, is supposed to be at the Idaho summit).
Google has its own worries, even though its revenue has been tumor despite the recession.
Its biggest potential problems see the light to subsist Twitter and Facebook, whose 25-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is uncertain whether he will attend Allen’s conference.
Twitter looms as a threat because the constant chirping on its service enables it to offer a search engine that illuminates which’s on family’s minds within seconds after they express it – a "real-time" look at the web that Google hasn’t yet perfected.
Facebook could turn into each even bigger challenge for Google. Facebook has attracted more than 200 million users and made it enticing for them to share personal details hind part before their backgrounds and lives. That bounteous of data – potentially insidious to advertisers – has eluded Google’sitting tentacles and could threaten its status in the same proportion that the internet’s most efficacious marketing vehicle.
Andreessen, a Facebook cover with boards member, thinks technologists like the leaders of Google are more likely to rise to the challenge than media companies still fighting to protect franchises born ahead of he helped simplify web surfing by co-founding Netscape Communications in 1994.
"In the technology industry, change is a constant so it feels like there is always a gun to your head," Andreessen said. "You quickly learn you have to either adapt or die."
