The now-ailing media mogul Sumner Redstone is widely credited with popularising the phrase “content is king”. The intuitive appeal of this aphorism has separated investors from their money across a wide range of media businesses.
The basic fallacy inherent in the sentiment, however, has ensured that these stories have ended unhappily from a financial point of view, and not just in movie making. In particular, pursuit of the content dream has been behind many disastrous forays into the business of education by some of the world’s most sophisticated investors.