Methodology

The Global Perspective of Media-for-Equity Report 2022 is published by the media-for-equity community club Borderbridge and the Grai Ventures startup studio in collaboration with Brand Capital International. Our design and development partner is Stoica Digital, and our principal data partner is Dealroom.

The information published in The Global Media-for-Equity Report is documented from conversations with media experts, startup founders, and investors, research in publicly available sources, and survey results. Specific parts of the data we collected and documented were shared under a confidentiality agreement.

We started this research with three purposes in our minds:

01

Research the evolution of media-for-equity on a global scale as an alternative/complementary financing model to fund startups.

02

Measure the success of the model on both startups and investors.

03

Explore the challenges and opportunities for media holdings and founders using media-for-equity as a driver for revenue growth and international expansion through case studies.

We have outlined the general media-for-equity investment groups from all over the world and analyzed relevant case studies based on the criteria relevant to the subject.

We analyzed the regions from various points of view:

We analyzed the media landscape in these specific regions and observed key media trends that led (or made it harder for) media-for-equity to be adopted.

We analyzed each media-for-equity investment fund activity, including the number of investments, exits, key team members, and contact information currently aggregated into a database.

We reached out to key team members from the identified media-for-equity investment funds with a list of questions we prepared based on our research up to that point.

For this research paper, we have used Dealroom, Crunchbase, and CBInsights with limited and premium access, to extract the number of investments done by each media-for-equity fund, Statista for the media landscape data, and other publicly available and certified sources that we could find.

There are several points to be acknowledged here:

The number is accurate based on the data gathered from Dealroom, Crunchbase, and CBInsights, where we followed the methodology of pinning down the investments made by each media-for-equity investment fund and media group.

The number is only accurate with the database, and we considered multiple media-for-equity deals made in the same startup/scaleup by different funds as different investments.

It is only safe to assume that there are more investments than the 793 we found. It is imperative to note them down, and in our database, we prepared a list with each investment fund’s portfolio. For more information on the media-for-equity database, email: contact@borderbridge.org.

There are several discrepancies regarding the type of investments, the number of investments, the startup founding date, and their status, as this information was not available or lacking in some cases.

The case studies were built upon qualitative research, followed by quantitative data made accessible by our partners and publicly available.

We also gathered information from interviews with key people from media-for-equity investment funds, startup founders, and media experts from India, Southeast Asia, Europe, Middle East, Australia and North America.