Part Four – Business and more Business
Could a Trump news company be successful financially? Yes. Absolutely. no doubt about it. There, you’ve now learned everything you need to know.
But in all seriousness, a Donald Trump Media company could be a very real business and if you wanted to see the possible business prospects for a Trump Media company… you’d have to look no further than Breitbart.com.
Similarities…
Since its creation in 2007, Breitbart.com has shot up the rankings to become a top 200 (Alexa ranked) website in the United States. That is huge. In a general sense, just making it into the top 1000 sites means you’ve become a bigly website.
Holding Company Breitbart News Network, LLC offers real-time access to news and analysis sources online. It provides news related to world, politics, business, sports, entertainment, sci/tech, health, odd, video, and images. Breitbart News Network, LLC was incorporated in 2011 and is based in Los Angeles, California. Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=140962866
Breitbart is a private company so its financial data is not publicly accessible. While we do not know how exactly how much revenue Breitbart makes… considering the size of its audience and that it’s run as a for profit business with annoying advertisements and all we can assume its revenues are significant.
Politico.com is ranked near Breitbart.com and reportedly makes over $80 million in revenue annually. While I severely doubt that Breitbart.com makes anywhere near as much as Politico… it gives us a ballpark estimate. I’d just assume that Breitbart makes ~ $30 million annually.
Okay… soooo…
It’s been estimated that a Trump Media company would only need about $10 million to get its feet off the ground and produce a sizable amount of ‘quality’ content.
Considering the fact that Donald Trump has personally gotten over $2 billion in free advertising so far this year… it’s not hard to imagine his Trump Media company immediately reaching the same scale as Breitbart. So that would mean Trump Media could very well be breaking even or better in its first year ( ~ $30 million in revenue – $10 million in costs).
What’s interesting is that Stephen Bannon was the editor of Breitbart before joining Trump’s campaign as his Chief Executive… so you’ve got to wonder… will Trump start his own media company with Bannon leading it? Or will they both go back to Breitbart? Or maybe they’ll go their separate ways and Trump will start Trump Media while Bannon at Breitbart competes for the same audience of alt-righters and Trumpkins. Who knows…
Deals, deals, and deals…
By all accounts Donald Trump is not one for hard work… he seems to prefer to slap his name on everything and then have everybody else do the work for him. So the thought that Trump would skip doing all the work required to create a new media company by just buying his way into an existing one does come to mind… who would he cut a deal with though?
- Fox News… Nope! By all accounts the people at Fox News, the actual worker bees that make the company function, are extremely unhappy with Donald Trump for a vast number of reasons. Upper management is trying to not rock the boat after the Ailes affair and most likely would despise the idea of having an inflammatory Donald Trump program airing on Fox. Why risk a multi-billion dollar company with a person most people quite literally hate?
- Breitbart? Completely possible. Bannon and Trump can just shuffle their ridiculous selves over to Breitbart after they lose, re-brand the whole site or part of it, and bam! Trump News.
- Any other major media company? No. Everybody hates him. He has personally insulted or threatened to sue pretty much every major publication now.
So basically… if he wants an in with a major publication it’s going to be Breitbart. All of the other media companies that might be receptive to Trump are comparatively small and don’t seem to have a direct relationship with him. Trump being Trump… a Trump news company will most likely be a ‘go big or go home’ affair.
New or Old? Start-up or existing company?
As we just discussed… Trump buying his way into the media business seems like an unlikely path for a Trump Media to come to be. It could happen certainly… but it just seems unlikely doesn’t it?
If this were any other person, I’d say that they’d never bother to even try starting a new media company. The expenses are enormous, the audiences uncaring, and the time frame long. It’s a terrible investment.
But this is Trump.
Trump has billions in free advertising and passionate fans to boot.
Anything he touches his fans will absolutely eat up (at least in the beginning). So for Trump, starting his own media company is a pretty safe bet… much safer than it’d be for anybody else in the world. Frankly I doubt even darth Putin could just start a news company tomorrow and be successful.
So if there’s going to be a Trump Media company… I think we ought to assume it’ll be a new creation with Bannon at the helm, occasional musings and insults out of Donald Trump, and with one or two of his children as ‘executives’ to boot.
What are you talking about… sum this up please…
- The business prospects for a Trump news company look great.
- Trump already has somebody with media experience in the form of Bannon.
- Trump has gotten billions in free advertising and has passionate fans that will love any news company he makes to death.
- Trump is a content farmer’s wet dream. Insults, racial musings, inflammatory language, sound bites out the wazoo.
- For god knows what reason, some people love his children too. Content farm version 2.0.
- The financial aspect looks alright. Revenue should easily exceed costs.
Trump the news company… from a business perspective… is a completely possible if not probable thing…
The Trump Media Inc. Ink (report) has been broken up into the following parts: Part One - Prelude Part Two - Precedent Part Three - Trump Media's Setup Part Four - Business and more Business Part Five - Key People Part Six - Trump Media Content Part Seven - Reaction Part Eight - A Summary Part Nine - Afterword Not all parts of this Ink will be released simultaneously. Each new part will be linked to above as they become available.