I read this morning, an article talking about the Big Four (Fairfax Media, News Limited, Ninemsn and Yahoo!).
 
Harold Mitchell wrote about the influence that the Big Four has played to the Australia public and the growth of advertising for all portal owners.
 
This year alone, Australia expects to make just under 40 per cent growth in online Advertising. Now, there’s a 5th wheel trying to join the Big Four – AOL, part of Time Warner!
 
Failing to make its impressions in the previous two launches, AOL needs to come up with some way to lure the audience from the Big Four. Competition here is tough no doubt, and I like how Mitchell put it, in saying that Vanessa Brown, boss of AOL can only wing this if she “has arranged for the US 7th Fleet to sit in Sydney Harbour with all guns aimed at the net guys”

Out here at Fairfax – we’ve got the Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood look a like – Jack Matthews. Jack is one of those CEOs that knows just how to get it done. His team is well established and well structured under his cowboy hat that they deliver exactly what Fairfax needed. Pippa Leary, from the News and Information of Fairfax Digital, supports Jack’s model and simply knows what it takes to meet the numbers.

News Limited has Ed Smith and Richard Freudenstein, both supporting the boss of News – John Hartigan. Internally there, I’m sure they are more being looked up to, but these are some smart players to be mentioned.

Yahoo!7 has its innovations back on track with Rohan Lund, coupled by the support of David Leckie. Then you have their paid TV salesman, James Warburton – who is apparently one of the countries highest paid salesmen, but it’s through him that you see Yahoo! and 7 moulding together.

Ninemsn has its quiet people like Tony Faure and Jason Scott, but with the backing of PBL and MSN, I’m not sure if there is much that you can do wrong.

As most you have read there are talks about Microsoft looking to buy out Yahoo! for a sum of approx $50 billion – will this affect the Big Four? Does it then become the Big Three? Where does Google fit into all of this?

2008 is an exciting year for all of the above mentioned companies. Only time will tell what each company has planned and rolled out, in order to get the bigger piece of the pie.

Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23171236-17061,00.html