More than two decades ago, the online service provider AOL bought Time Warner for $183 billion, marking what was then the largest merger in American business history. The goal—to bring a traditional media company into the digital age—was ahead of its time.
It was also, for all intents and purposes, an unmitigated disaster. Over the next decade, layoffs, federal investigations, and executive departures galore ensued as the two companies combined about as well as hair and bubblegum do, and before the decade was done, Time Warner opted to spin AOL off into its own company.
Despite the disastrous result, the merger ushered in a quarter-century of even more frantic concentration in the media and tech space, where newly established and fast-growing giants like Meta and Google looked to extinguish the competition through absorption, while traditional media stalwarts have increasingly looked to compete against them.
Take Google buying YouTube and DoubleClick within a year of each other, or Facebook acquiring Instagram in 2012, which can in retrospect be viewed as some of the most consequential acquisitions in the digital media space. Or look at the TV side, where Disney bought 20th Century Fox (after acquiring Pixar and Marvel Entertainment), CBS and Viacom reuniting after an earlier split (and rebranding to Paramount), or AT&T’s 2018 acquisition and 2022 spinoff of Time Warner, which then merged with Discovery Corp., creating Warner Bros. Discovery.
There are other major acquisitions that have reshaped tech and media, too, like when Amazon bought the studio MGM for $8.5 billion and became the new owner of franchises like James Bond, and deals that could, like Walmart’s recent acquisition of Vizio, which gave the retailer a foothold in connected TV after previous failed efforts.
Some mergers have been undisputed successes, like the House of Mouse getting its hands on Pixar, while others have been deemed outright failures—and there are plenty more cases in between. And amid the major cornerstones are countless other smaller transactions and sales. And for many of the past 25 years, a more laissez-faire approach from regulators meant that these deals, for the most part, breezed through.
The result is an industry that has spent 25 years and counting gobbling itself up, creating, paradoxically, a landscape that is both more vertically integrated and somehow more fragmented than ever before. Advertisers, meanwhile, are left trying to balance reaching as many eyeballs as possible while benefitting from enough competition to keep costs down.
“Advertisers need to balance efficiency with leverage in their ideal world, meaning they want to have as many possible suppliers who have as much scale as possible, so that they can ideally play as many of them off against each other,” said Brian Wieser, an industry analyst and principal at Madison and Wall. “That’s not what happens in reality.”
Digital dollars
When it comes to owning global advertising, two decades of acquisitions have given some companies a bigger leg up than others. As of 2024, Google, Meta, and Amazon together accounted for 41% of global advertising revenue, according to GroupM, and just about half of all ad revenue in the US, according to Madison and Wall.
This has been partially achieved through seemingly countless acquisitions, like Amazon purchasing Twitch and Wondery; Meta acquiring Oculus and WhatsApp; and Google buying Waze and AdMeld. On the other side of the equation are traditional TV companies, where, through a series of mergers, HBO is now corporate cousins with the Property Brothers.
In TV, advertisers once only had three major networks to navigate, but the success of Silicon Valley behemoths in the digital space kicked off a proverbial arms race for eyeballs, where broadcasters, networks, streamers, operating systems, and even retailers are left pitching both audiences and efficiency—something that has rarely been the strong suit of linear television, outside of live sports.
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“It was pretty obvious even in the ’90s that many of the analog, old-guard businesses weren’t going to transform fast enough,” Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital, told Marketing Brew.
Those old-guard businesses continue to face even more pressure as audiences shift their own preferences. In 2019, when US adults engaged with media, they spent 51% of that time with digital media and 49% with traditional methods, according to eMarketer. Today, those figures are 66% and 34%, respectively—and when consumers do stream, it’s usually to watch YouTube.
All of that has benefitted tech companies like Google and Meta that are able to sell the more precise, data-driven, heat-seeking targeted advertising that marketers love. Traditional media companies, previously able to only really compete with scale, have rolled out their own ad-tech solutions, which are often facilitated through—you guessed it—acquisitions. In 2014, Comcast acquired the video ad server FreeWheel, and in 2018, AT&T acquired the ad-tech platform AppNexus, though it sold it to Microsoft three years later.
For buyers, consolidation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “We can look across the landscape a little bit more seamlessly,” Samantha Rose, a strategic investment lead at Horizon Media, told Marketing Brew.
Traditional TV networks aren’t looking like the future of the media business, Rose said, which is perhaps why companies like Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery are attempting to sell off their weaker cable channel businesses. Wieser called this move “deconsolidation,” and said that in some cases, the move can further complicate things for advertisers.
“There’s no reflection of reality in a business strategy that says this is a positive thing,” he said.
(Mostly) unfettered expansion
For media companies, the period of acquisition after acquisition has been met with little resistance—up until relatively recently, that is.
“It’s been decades of relentless consolidation that really has not been challenged up until the last Trump and Biden administrations,” Tom Blakely, a contributor to the Big Tech on Trial newsletter, told Marketing Brew. “It’s going to take maybe as long to see progress in the other direction, to unwind these monopolies and see new market participants.”
Though the first Trump administration wasn’t exactly a turnstile for M&A, under the Biden administration, tie-ups were under more scrutiny with Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). A skeptic of corporate power, Khan, who was appointed in 2021, sued Amazon and Meta for alleged antitrust violations and sought to block Kroger from acquiring rival grocer Albertsons (which, if combined, would have created a formidable counterweight to retail media networks owned by the likes of Target and Walmart) as well as Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, though that deal went through in 2023. The FTC also challenged Adobe’s acquisition of the design software company Figma, which eventually fell through.
Perhaps more importantly, the more aggressive FTC had a brief chilling effect on the M&A market, often stopping deals in the boardroom rather than the courtroom.
It’s unclear exactly how the Trump administration might proceed. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson reportedly warned executives in mid-March that if a company’s conduct or a merger hurt consumers, “I’m taking you to court,” per Axios.
In the meantime, uncertainty around tariffs has cooled dealmaking. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, recently told investors that further media consolidation might just look like more cross-platform streaming bundles.
That’s a far cry from what he optimistically shared in November. “This is an industry,” he said then, “that really needs to consolidate.”
This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.
