Media Investment Arm Data Point

It’s no secret that established media firms like newspaper publishers, TV networks and music companies have spent years trying to figure out how to survive technology’s erosion of their businesses. New data show which media companies have been the most active venture investors, mostly in areas that could be natural extensions from media like digital marketing or e-commerce.

As the accompanying chart shows, the list is topped by Comcast. Also active: Bloomberg, Time Warner, the Newhouse family’s privately held media conglomerate Advance Publications, the New York Times Co. and Hearst.

The Information asked research firm PitchBook to compile a list of the most active media company investors over the past decade. The list looks at the number of investments rather than the dollar amount invested. Limitations of publicly-available data means it’s difficult to isolate how much money individual companies invested or what their returns are when companies are acquired or go public.

Outpacing all the rest is Comcast, which has made 146 investments in the last decade, more than twice the second most on the list. All but two of those were made by Comcast’s venture arm, which frequently invests multiple times in the same startup; 46 of its investments over the last decade were follow-on rounds. The company has had 40 exits over the same period. Comcast’s numbers do not include investments made by NBCUniversal, a division of the company, which has made some significant bets of its own, like $200 investments in BuzzFeed and Vox Media earlier this year.

Several other big media companies also invested through venture arms, including Time Warner and Hearst. That doesn’t preclude business units making their own investments although they’d likely have different priorities. Having separate venture arms allows the companies to allocate a specific amount of money for risky investments, staffed with people experienced in venture capital, leaving business units free to focus on their core business.

Time Warner and Hearst, along with AOL, also showed a lot of exits relative to investments. Some of these may have been from investments made from an earlier time period. For example, AOL and Hearst both invested in the online video platform Brightcove in 2005, and it took another eight years before the startup went public. Likewise, it could take some time before we see whether or not many of the investments made in the last decade will pan out.

The other companies have had far fewer exits. Bloomberg Beta, which invested in the third-highest number of companies in the last decade, has only seen three exits. Advance Publications, owner of a string of newspapers including the Oregonian and Newark Star-Ledger, magazines like Vanity Fair and Bon Appetit and cable TV systems, has invested in 18 different firms but only seen three of its investments exit. The New York Times has invested in 17 companies but only had seven exits.

For most of these companies, though, the point of the investments may be more to learn about digital technology than to generate big returns.

Advance Publications has invested in e-commerce startups like Farfetch and Rent the Runway. In fact, nearly all the companies on this list have invested in at least one e-commerce startup—a category that media companies are frequently trying to tap into and complement their digital ad revenue.

Also popular as a media investment are ad tech and digital marketing firms. Advance invested in content recommendation service Taboola, News Corp owns a piece of online ad server Rubicon Project, and the New York Times invested (twice) in audience analytics startup DynamicYield.

Meanwhile the television, music and film companies tend to focus on startups that are very close to the main businesses. Universal Music Group has spread money around a handful of companies that focus on live events and ticketing. Hearst invested in content sites like BuzzFeed and Roku. And independent media company Chernin Group has invested in online video firms MiTu and Fullscreen (which it later acquired as part of a joint venture with AT&T).

Bloomberg Beta, an investment arm of financial services and media company Bloomberg LP, operates slightly differently than the rest on this list. It invests explicitly for a financial return and not necessarily in startups that are related to its parent company’s core business.