Independent research on modern media competition

The Media Competition Initiative (MCI) is an independent research project of American Capitol Media focused on competition, regulatory parity, and structural imbalance in the modern media marketplace.

Our research examines the impact of Big Tech dominance, advertising migration, network concentration, and regulatory asymmetries on competitive conditions for legacy media, often to their systematic disadvantage. Its purpose is to ensure that competition policy, media regulation, and public debate reflect current market realities rather than outdated assumptions that no longer serve consumers, local journalism, fair competition or the public interest. 

The Media Competition Initiative is nonpartisan and research-driven. It is not a think tank, advocacy organization, lobbying effort, public-relations vehicle, or legal initiative. It relies on intellectual independence and the ability to advance ideas that endure beyond a single company, transaction, or regulatory proceeding. 

Capital markets reward clarity. They penalize uncertainty.  In today’s media economy, few forces create more of either than measurement. 

Advertising revenue, company valuation, and deal logic increasingly depend not just on audience scale, but on the credibility of the data used to prove it. In a fragmented media landscape—broadcast, cable, streaming, FAST, social video—measurement has quietly become a form of financial infrastructure. Investors may debate content strategy, bundling, or consolidation. But they rely on measurement to decide what those strategies are worth.

Measurement as a Valuation Input

Advertising dollars do not move on narrative alone. They move on proof. Proof of reach. Proof of engagement. Proof that revenue is repeatable and comparable across platforms and time.That proof directly affects multiples. Companies with transparent, trusted measurement command more stable advertising revenue and lower perceived risk. Companies whose metrics are opaque, proprietary, or constantly shifting face valuation discounts—especially in volatile markets. Measurement, in this sense, functions much like accounting standards. It does not create value by itself, but it determines whether value can be reliably priced.

Fragmentation Raises the Cost of Uncertainty

Media fragmentation has accelerated faster than measurement standardisation.  As platforms multiply, advertisers and investors face a basic problem: comparing unlike things. A minute of linear television, a minute of connected TV, and a minute of mobile video are not economically identical, but they must still be assessed within a common framework.Without comparability, capital allocation suffers. Dollars drift toward scale and leverage rather than efficiency and performance. Smaller or local media assets—often profitable but harder to model—are undervalued.For financial markets, this is not innovation. It is noise.

Independent Measurement as Market Discipline

Independent measurement is sometimes characterised as a legacy constraint.  In practice, it serves as a disciplining mechanism.It limits self-reporting bias. It constrains opportunistic redefinitions of success. It anchors market expectations over time. When platforms control both inventory and the metrics used to evaluate it, conflicts emerge. Investors understand this dynamic instinctively. Markets function best when measurement is structurally separate from the transactions it informs. This is why established institutions such as Nielsen continue to matter. Their value lies less in any single dataset than in continuity, independence, and longitudinal credibility—attributes that markets reward during periods of transition.

M&A Raises the Stakes

As media consolidation returns to the agenda, measurement takes on heightened importance. Deals are no longer sold primarily on content synergy. They are sold on scale, particularly scale in advertising, data, and distribution. But scale without credible measurement does not translate cleanly into value. Investors underwriting large transactions need confidence that combined audiences are real, non-duplicative, and monetisable. Advertisers demand assurance that expanded reach produces measurable outcomes.In this context, measurement becomes a form of deal insurance. Weak or fragmented metrics increase post-merger risk. Strong, independent benchmarks reduce it.

Measurement and Cost of Capital

The relationship between measurement and financing is often overlooked.Predictable advertising revenue lowers volatility. Lower volatility reduces the cost of capital. Clear metrics support forward guidance, covenant modelling, and long-term planning. Conversely, when measurement credibility erodes, uncertainty rises. Revenue forecasts become less reliable. Discount rates increase. For CFOs and boards, this is not an abstract debate. It affects borrowing costs, equity pricing, and strategic optionality.

A Strategic Asset, Not a Regulatory Question

Debates around measurement often drift into legal or regulatory territory. That framing misses the point. The more consequential question is strategic: what kind of market do media companies want to operate in? One where performance is independently verified, comparable, and trusted? Or one where value depends on proprietary dashboards and asymmetric information?Capital markets have a clear preference.

Questions for Executives and Investors

Three questions increasingly shape investor perception:

1. Can advertisers and analysts compare performance across platforms with confidence?
2. Are reported metrics stable over time, or constantly redefined?
3. Does measurement reduce uncertainty—or compound it?

Companies that answer these well enjoy greater credibility. Those that do not face scepticism, regardless of audience size.

Bottom Line

Measurement has become one of the quiet determinants of media value. Not because it dictates strategy but because it determines whether strategy can be priced, financed, and scaled. As consolidation accelerates and advertising models evolve, independent measurement is less a legacy artifact than a stabilising force.Markets depend on it. Capital prices it. Executives ignore it at their peril. 

(c) American Capitol Media. All rights reserved. January 2026

Structural Asymmetry in the Rules Means Imbalanced Competition

Debates about media competition often focus on size. Larger companies are presumed to pose greater risks. Smaller ones are presumed to be safer. This intuition once aligned with how markets worked.

Today, it obscures the real issue. The central competition problem in modern media is not scale. It is structural asymmetry.

Structural asymmetry arises when firms competing for the same customers operate under very different rules. In media, that imbalance is stark. Broadcast television remains subject to ownership limits, public-interest obligations, local programming requirements, and detailed regulatory oversight. Digital platforms face few comparable constraints.

Yet these entities compete directly for audiences and advertising dollars. Viewers move seamlessly between broadcast content and platform-distributed video. Advertisers allocate budgets across both without regard to regulatory categories.

When regulated firms are restricted from achieving efficient scale while unregulated firms expand freely, competition tilts. That tilt does not enhance rivalry. It distorts it.

In such an environment, consolidation among regulated players often reflects a defensive response. It is an effort to maintain investment, support content production, and remain viable in the face of unconstrained competitors. Treating that response as inherently anticompetitive misunderstands its cause.

This does not mean consolidation is always benign. It means scale cannot be evaluated in isolation from the rules under which firms operate. Competition policy that focuses solely on ownership counts while ignoring regulatory imbalance risks protecting incumbency rather than competition.

Structural asymmetry also freezes markets. When rules prevent regulated firms from adapting, markets stagnate. Capital becomes harder to deploy. Innovation slows. The competitive advantage shifts toward firms least constrained by public obligations.

These dynamics are difficult to address because they challenge long-standing narratives. It is more comfortable to view competition as a simple matter of counting owners than to examine whether the rules themselves shape outcomes.

Regulated firms are poorly positioned to raise this issue forcefully. When they argue for parity, they are often accused of seeking deregulation. That accusation shuts down discussion before it begins. Independent voices can ask a different question. Are the existing rules producing fair competition, or are they distorting markets in favor of those outside the regulatory system?

That question deserves an answer grounded in evidence, not reflex.

Competition is not defined solely by the number of participants. It is defined by whether participants are allowed to compete on reasonably equal terms. In today’s media markets, they are not.

Ignoring that fact does not preserve competition. It reshapes it in favor of those with the fewest constraints.

(c) 2025 American Capitol Media. All rights reserved.

 Local Broadcast No Longer Sets the Price of Local Advertising.

For many years, broadcast merger review rested on a simple premise: local television stations set the price of local advertising. That premise shaped how regulators measured market power and competitive harm. It influenced how transactions were evaluated and how remedies were designed.

At one time, the premise was correct. It is no longer.

Local advertisers today operate in a fundamentally different environment. When deciding how to spend their budgets, they do not ask only which television station to buy. They ask where their money will perform best. The available answers now extend far beyond broadcast.

Streaming platforms, connected television, digital video, social media, search advertising, and programmatic buys all compete directly for the same advertising dollars. Budgets shift across these channels based on performance, reach, targeting, and cost. Local broadcast remains relevant, but it is no longer the price-setter.

The defining feature of modern advertising markets is substitution. Advertisers move spending easily from one platform to another. When prices rise or performance declines in one channel, budgets migrate elsewhere. That ability to substitute disciplines pricing more effectively than competition among local stations alone ever did.

This reality undermines the assumption that broadcast stations exercise pricing power within a closed local market. Pricing is now constrained by options that did not meaningfully exist when legacy analytical models were developed.

Yet those models persist. Merger review still often centers on the 30-second television spot as the core unit of analysis. Station-to-station comparisons within a local market remain central, even as advertisers treat broadcast as one option among many.

The persistence of this approach reflects familiarity more than accuracy. It is easier to analyze what regulators have always analyzed than to account for a more complex, dynamic marketplace. But convenience is not a substitute for correctness.

If broadcast no longer sets prices, then traditional measures of market concentration overstate competitive harm. That does not mean broadcast has lost value. It means broadcast competes in a broader market where power is dispersed across platforms.

This distinction matters. Competition policy that ignores substitution misidentifies where power actually resides. It risks constraining regulated actors while leaving unregulated ones untouched.

Broadcasters themselves face a credibility problem in making this argument. When they point to digital competition, critics often respond that they are minimizing their own influence. That reaction is predictable, but it does not change the facts.

Independent analysis can present the same evidence without triggering reflexive skepticism. The data does not become less true because it is uncomfortable. What changes is whether regulators are willing to engage with it.

Local advertising today is not governed by a single medium. It is shaped by performance-driven choices across many platforms. Broadcast participates in that contest, but it does not control it.

Competition analysis should reflect that reality. If it does not, it risks regulating a market that no longer exists.

(c) 2025 American Capitol Media. All rights reserved.