What Place for Porter's Value Chain Model in Today's Media Industries?

What place for Porter's value chain model in today's media industries?

???Is Porter still relevant and useful or are there better ways of describing media businesses?

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???Nowadays media industries are undergoing a fundamental transformation, how to get the competitive advantage in the media industries seems very necessary. Among all the strategies, it seems that the most useful and widely known one is the value chain model which put forward by Porter (1985) that as a basic tool in the literature of economics and business management to analyze the internal competitive advantage. Value chain model is ‘the basis tool for diagnosing competitive advantage and finding ways to enhance competitive advantage, which divides a firm into the discrete activities it performs in designing, producing, marketing, and distributing its product' (Porter, 1998, p26). The purpose of this essay is to analyze the status and effect of the value chain model in today's media industries and try to explore the other better ways of describing media businesses which has been changed greatly by the internet and digitalization. This will be done in four parts: the main theory of Porter's value chain model; the current state of the media industries and the characteristics of the media; the application of value chain model in media industries; the limitation of value chain model in the convergence media industries and the other ways to describe media businesses, such as supply chains.

???Value chain model is an widely accepted terminology in academic literatures and are believably deposited to address many of the respects that business practitioners have in industry (Feller et al. 2006). This concept was first put forward by Porter in 1985. Porter argues that competitive advantage stem from many discrete activities a firm performs in designing, producing, marketing, delivering and supporting its product and all these activities can be represented by a value chain model (Porter, 1998). In other words, the value chain model shows how a product or service is created then finally be delivered to the customers as an internal process. In the economic activities, value chain is everywhere, it is not only exists in the different units of a firm as an internal value