WSJ.com - Media Firms Dig Into War Chests For Latest Assault on the Internet

But Viacom and Disney say they aren't pursuing the portal strategy. Disney, which took a roughly $1 billion charge related to the closure of its Go.com portal, has said there's no reason to revisit those failures. "I don't see us playing catch-up to the Googles of the world," Disney President Robert Iger said recently at a Goldman Sachs investors conference.

I don't suppose it's wise to count out Big Content, but I think this quote from new Disney Prexy Bob Iger is quite revealing; I don't see Disney playing catch-up to Google or Yahoo! either.

As all media becomes digital, asynchronous, and delivered over the network, the companies occupying the high ground in digital network advertising will move from strength to strength. The content flows to the dollars, and the dollars are flowing increasingly towards more precisely measurable and targeted advertising models.

It used to be that companies like DoubleClick, my erstwhile employer 24/7 Real Media, Aquantive, or ValueClick were supposed to benefit from this evolution, but I think it's safe to call the game over for those guys and cede victory to Yahoo!, Google, and perhaps Microsoft.

See, they're the new platforms, and anything that's digital is just another application for them, like Gmail or Yahoo! News. They've successfully abstracted and separated infrastructure, platform, and business model to create the logical future "space" for media companies. In other words, Disney would be smart to focus on creating and owning things people want to watch, listen to, play, or buy, and accept the fact that they'll be splitting the ad revenue with (and possibly renting their exhibition/distribution space from) the new gateways to the audience (and the advertiser dollar): the web media powerhouses.

I suppose this is why News Corp's acquisitions, especially of MySpace/Intermix, make little sense to me. There's no end-run around Yahoo! or Google. Irony of ironies, the only company with the weapons to fight this fight head-on may be Time Warner, given AOL's (eroding) strength, although that's entirely mitigated by AOL's lack of control over their search advertising platform (currently supplied by Google); buying advertising.com doesn't give them anywhere near enough technology assets to be considered heavyweight in this case.