Tech giants' stranglehold over digital media revenue loosened by growing regulation and market diversity

Now in its fourth edition, Omdia’s Consumer Platforms’ Share of Digital Media Forecast looks at what share of the digital media market has been captured by the seven tech giants with the broadest media & entertainment portfolios—Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Google, Meta, and Tencent.

The Internet was meant to be a great democratizer but, as a business, it has concentrated a tremendous amount of power in the hands of a few companies. We estimate that the “big seven” control nearly two-thirds of the market globally.

But, although they will sustain their market stranglehold over the next five years, their collective share will stagnate (at around 63%) and shrink in three of the six market segments broken out in the forecast—namely advertising, app ecosystems, and videogames. Not only that, but some of the tech giants will lose market share—namely Alibaba, Apple, and Google—although principally to others among their number.

In fact, the big seven’s dominance would be shrinking right now if ByteDance was not included in the group. And will shrink if US lawmakers go ahead next year with their threat to ban TikTok, ByteDance’s main revenue driver outside China.

Growing competition in the advertising market, combined with a strong antitrust pushback from lawmakers in the world’s biggest markets, are the main reasons for the peaking power of most of the GAMA companies featured in this forecast.

Advertising behemoths Google and Meta are losing ground to rest-of-market players that are increasingly competing for ad budgets to supplement user-spend revenue, as well as to the burgeoning ad businesses of fellow tech giants Amazon and ByteDance. ?

A few years back, the tech giants could have neutralized market challengers through acquisitions or kept them at bay by skewing the playing field in their favour. But the newly hostile regulatory environment means they are in danger of not only losing their gatekeeper powers, but of being broken up also. On the user-spend front, Apple and Google will see their market share chipped away as their mobile app billing duopoly gets torn down.