Nine Entertainment has a new contestant in its game of corporate leadership: It’s Matt Stanton, who – having just been appointed chief executive after leading the group in an acting role for the past six months – now gets to pit his skills at saving or even growing the country’s largest media company.

Running Nine is no mean feat. It is a company with assets – particularly traditional broadcast television – that are structurally challenged, whose businesses are competing for revenue against the giant new media platforms like Google, Facebook and TikTok or streamers like Netflix, and whose fortunes rise and fall with the broader advertising market.

As Stanton put it on Thursday: “The external environment for all media companies is tough”.

The prize money is big if he gets it right. If he hits the earnings jackpot, he could make $6 million a year. That’s rich pickings for running a company capitalised at about $2.5 billion.