Time Warner Discovery Merger’s Latest Victim: Cartoon Network’s Entire Web Presence
You might recall that AT&T’s $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV was supposed to transform the telecom giant into a modern internet video advertising superpower. Instead, after a massive amount of debt and endless bumbling, AT&T wound up laying off more than 50,000 people, closing a bunch of popular brands (like Mad Magazine), and selling what was left to Discovery.
The executives at Discovery have proven no less bumbling, and after firing more people and ruining a bunch of additional services (like HBO), the company saw its stock tank last week after having to take a $9.1 billion write down on the value of its entire TV division.
Like other mindlessly merging media monstrosities completely out of ideas (Paramount/CBS is engaged in similar cannibalization), Warner Bros Discovery is now looking to miraculously cut costs to reduce massive debt created by its pointlessly doomed merger.
At Paramount, that meant the complete erasure of both Comedy Central’s online footprint and the entire MTV News journalism archive. At Warner Bros Discovery, that most recently meant the deletion of Cartoon Network’s entire online presence (without any warning, we should add):
“Warner Bros. Discovery this week pulled the entire contents of cartoonnetwork.com offline — redirecting visitors to a landing page on Max, its subscription-streaming service, encouraging fans to sign up to watch their favorite Cartoon Network shows. The shuttering of the site appears to have happened Thursday, Aug. 8.”
At the same time users are losing features and history, Max is slathering their products with new ads and restrictions, while endlessly raising prices on a streaming product that’s of lower quality than before the entire saga began.
These mergers were supposed to usher forth a wave of amazing synergies and create a new media juggernaut. Instead they’ve resulted in just endless annoyance and chaos. And the executives in charge of them, like fail upward Time Warner brunchlord David Zaslav, saw accountability in the form of massive compensation packages utterly untethered from any sort of actual competency.
These brunchlords are purely extractive; they don’t care about customers, employees, history, or much of anything else. After mismanaging their companies through the cord cutting revolution they’re looking for quick mergers, a short-lived stock boost, a tax break, and a fat payout before they’re off to the next company to do the same thing, financially incentivized to learn nothing from experience.
Their mismanagement is treated by the business press not as bumbling incompetence, but as some kind of cold but cleverly necessary mathematics. All the problems are somehow caused by ambiguous externalities. Whether pointless consolidation at the hands of raging incompetents is at the heart of the problem isn’t even something most in the business press feels its within their purview to contemplate.