Two of Hesmondhalgh’s key ideas are:

• the idea that the largest companies or conglomerates now operate across a number of different cultural industries
• the idea that the radical potential of the internet has been contained to some extent by its partial incorporation into a large, profit-orientated set of cultural industries

Hesmondhalgh argues that major cultural organisations create products for different industries in order to maximize chances of commercial success. In relation to online products, he argues that major IT companies now compete with the more traditional media conglomerates within the cultural sector: ‘Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon are now as significant as News Corporation, Time Warner and Sony for understanding cultural production and consumption.’