The Big Five of Commercial Media

After a number of mergers and acquisitions five powerful media conglomerates lead the world's content production and distribution. They operate on an international basis with subsidiaries all around the globe and engage in every imaginable kind of media industry.

Table: The World's Leading Media Companies

Media Company

 1998 Revenues

(in US$)

 Property/Corporate Information
AOL Time Warner (US)

 26,838.000.000*

 http://www.timewarner.com/corp/about/timewarnerinc/corporate/index.html
Disney (US)

 22,976.000.000

 http://www.disney.com
Bertelsmann (GER)

 16,389.000.000

http://www.bertelsmann.com/facts/report/report.cfm
News Corporation (AUS)

 12,841.000.000

 http://www.newscorp.com/public/cor/cor_m.htm
Viacom (US)

 12,100.000.000

 http://www.viacom.com/global.tin


(* Revenues of Time Warner only (merger with AOL took place in January 2000)

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Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

b. July 1, 1646, Leipzig
d. November 14, 1716, Hannover, Hanover

German philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, important both as a metaphysician and as a logician and distinguished also for his independent invention of the differential and integral calculus. 1661, he entered the University of Leipzig as a law student; there he came into contact with the thought of men who had revolutionized science and philosophy--men such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes. In 1666 he wrote De Arte Combinatoria ("On the Art of Combination"), in which he formulated a model that is the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers.

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