Newspaper circulation down 10.6 percent
NEW YORK (AP) — The decline in U.S. newspaper circulation is accelerating as the industry continues to struggle with reader defections to the Internet and tumbling ad revenue.
New figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations show that average daily circulation dropped 10.6 percent in the April-September period from the same six-month span in 2008.
That’s greater than the 7.1 percent decline in the October-March period.
Sunday circulation fell 7.5 percent.
As expected, The Wall Street Journal has surpassed USA Today as the top-selling newspaper in the United States.
Newspaper sales have been declining since the early 1990s, but the drop has accelerated in recent years. Circulation revenue has largely held up, though, because of price increases.
via Newspaper circulation down 10.6 percent – Yahoo! Finance.
Ad spending 2009: Even media is buying less media | Company Town | Los Angeles Times
How brutal is the advertising market? Even big media isn’t spending as much on big media.Advertising tracker TNS Media Intelligence this morning issued the grim news that ad spending plummeted 14.3% to $60.87 billion during the first six months of 2009 compared with the first half of 2008. The second quarter of 2009 became the fifth consecutive quarter to post year-over-year declines.
Among those cutting back on advertising was media itself. Walt Disney Co., News Corp. and Time Warner Inc. all reined in ad spending in the first half of the year. Spending by Time Warner was down 11.1% to $574.3 million; Disney expenditures were down 11.7% to $517.6 million; and News Corp. cut its ad spending by 6.9% to $672.3 million.
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Newspapers, magazines, television and radio all felt the pain of a dismal first half. Newspaper ad spending was off 24.2% compared with the first half of 2008; radio spending plunged 24.6%; television spending (including national network, local station, syndicated and Spanish-language outlets) was off 10%; magazine spending dropped 20.9%; and billboards and other outdoor media saw their ad revenues tumble 15.7%.
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The only growing media sectors were Internet display advertising and free circular inserts in newspapers. Internet display advertising increased 6.5% compared with the first half of 2008 while newspaper insert spending climbed 4.6%.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2009/09/ad-spending-2009-even-media-is-buying-less-media.html
Analysts: Newspaper Ad Recovery Stalled?
Wells Fargo analysts John Janedis, Jaime Morris and Brendan Metrano have thrown cold water on a potential advertising recovery in third quarter.
According to a note released on Gannett, the bellwether of newspapers, the team said ad revenue has stalled in August while September appears to be starting off weak.
Wells Fargo reduced its Q3 newspaper advertising revenue estimate for Gannett from a decline of 25.5 percent to a decline of 28.8 percent. Local is forecast to fall 22.5 percent, national is anticipated to drop 21 percent and classified is estimated to decrease 40 percent versus a previous -19 percent, -18 percent and -37 percent respectively.
Overall advertising revenue is expected to fall 20.2 percent in Q4, revised down from a decline of 16.9 percent.Wells Fargo maintains its “market perform” rating on Gannett NYSE: GCI. As of late morning, shares of GCI were trading up 12 cents to $8.04.
SpotMixer and Google Pair to Offer Self-Serve Online Video Ads
One True Media’s SpotMixer do-it-yourself online video ad technology is now available to Google AdWords in-stream video advertisers, an arrangement that allows users to make videos that can run over the Google Content Network or on YouTube.
The partnership with Google is not the first for Redwood City, Ca.-based One True Media, a company founded four years ago. The company partnered with Google TV Ads in January. its SpotMixer platform automatically grabs text from AdWords ads and inserts it into tailored 15- to 30-second-long video ads within the user’s AdWords account. Users can customize the videos by adding photos, video, and voiceovers. The conversions are done dynamically, with templates and content being changed to avoid identical videos.
There are many vendors offering similar self-serve video platforms, including Jivox and FourSpots. Google also already offers an ad creation marketplace that pairs online video producers such as Turn Here with advertisers.
Newspapers Slow To Exploit Digital
“The news industry has so far failed to make the digital transition,” is the blunt synopsis offered by veteran industry analyst Ken Doctor in a new report from Outsell, Inc., titled “Top 15 U.S. New Companies Print-to-Digital Market Size and Share.” Reviewing the last few years, Doctor — a former newspaperman and close follower of the ailing medium — finds little but disappointment in the efforts of newspaper publishers to build online revenues.
According to Doctor, newspapers earned just 11% of their total revenues from digital sources in 2008, including both advertising and circulation revenues. The best performers in this regard, the Washington Post Co. and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., still had fairly low proportions of online revenue in the total mix (15% and 14%, respectively).
Here there is a yawning divide between newspapers and other sectors of the information industry, like technical and medical publishing. While the proportion of news revenues derived from digital sources grew from 7.2% in 2006 to 11% in 2008, the rest of the information industry (excluding news providers) grew from 65.3% to 70.2%. In other words, those other sectors had already substantially completed their transition from print to digital revenues in 2006 — but newspapers have scarcely begun theirs.
via MediaPost Publications Outsell: Newspapers Slow To Exploit Digital 08/27/2009.
MediaPost Publications Ink Stains: Newspaper Revenues Down 29% 08/28/2009
Newspaper revenues fell by almost one-third in the second quarter of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008, from $10.1 billion to $6.8 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
The overall decline of 29% resulted from a 30% drop in print revenues — from $9.3 billion to just under $6.2 billion — and a 16% drop in online revenues, from $778 million to $653 million.
As in previous quarters, the losses cut across every major advertising category, with national dropping 30% from $1.6 billion to $1.1 billion, retail dropping 25% from $4.7 billion to $3.6 billion, and classifieds down a whopping 40% from $2.5 billion to $1.4 billion.
The continuing collapse of classified revenues is especially bad news, as they were long the mainstay of newspaper ad revenues.
In the second quarter, automotive classifieds tumbled 43% to $332 million, real estate fell 46% to $336 million, and recruitment plunged an alarming 66% to $202 million.
Newspaper slump deepens as 2Q ad sales fall 29 pct – Yahoo! Finance
SAN FRANCISCO AP — Newspapers’ financial woes worsened in the second quarter as advertising sales shrank by 29 percent, leaving publishers with $2.8 billion less revenue than they had at the same time last year.It’s the deepest downturn yet during a three-year free fall in advertising revenue — newspapers’ main source of income. The magnitude of the industry’s advertising losses have intensified in each of the last 12 quarters.
The latest turbulence left U.S. newspapers with ad sales of $6.8 billion in this year’s second quarter compared to $9.6 billion last year.
Through the first half of the year, newspaper ad revenue plunged 29 percent to $13.4 billion.
Harris: Advertisers Migrate From Print To Net
The LinkedIn-Harris poll of 1,015 top executives at ad agencies and their corporate clients from June 22-June 30 found that while the number of advertisers using print and online are still roughly equal — 88% and 92%, respectively — the trend lines for the two media are headed in opposite directions.
Some 74% of advertisers that use Internet say they are using it more than they did one year ago, while 49% of advertisers that use print say they are using it less. Another 41% of advertisers that use print say their spending has remained steady with a year ago.
On the upside, 54% of advertisers that spend money online do so as part of a broader, multimedia campaign strategy, versus just 14% that only advertise online. The poll also had some good news for mobile advertising, which has struggled to find its footing in the U.S. market: 69% of advertisers that employ mobile advertising say they are using it more than they did a year ago, suggesting the medium has proven itself — at least to marketers willing to try it.
Via MediaPost
Online Ad Revenues At The New York Times Keep Dropping Like A Rock
As if the New York Times doesn’t have enough to worry about, with total advertising revenues down 32 percent in the second quarter, its online business is deteriorating as well. In its earnings announcement this morning, the company breaks out Internet advertising revenues of $68 million, which is a 15.5 percent drop from a year ago.
The year-over-year declines keep getting worse, as you can see in the chart above. In the last three quarters the annual decline went from a 3.5 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2008 to a 6.1 percent decrease in the first quarter of 2009 to negative 15.5 percent this quarter.
Annual Decline In Internet Advertising Revenues
4Q08: -3.5%
1Q09: -6.1%
2Q09: -15.5%
While the $68 million is a fraction of the NYT’s $454 million in total advertising revenues in the quarter and an even smaller portion of the company’s overall revenues of $702 million, which includes circulation and other sources, the NYT is a bellwether when it comes to media sites on the Web. And if it can’t stem the bleeding on the Web side of its business, other publishers are likely having trouble as well.
Via TechCrunch
Online Advertising’s $65 Billion Problem
A huge — $65 billion huge — part of the online advertising problem is that Web marketers know exactly how the Web works and how to engage its users — on their own.
These big companies know that using popular platforms like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and yes, the Internet itself, they can market their products without paying for any advertising at all.
To this point, it’s worth reading CEO of Media research and advisory firm Outsell Anthea Stratigos’s Q&A with Forbes.
In it, she tells Forbes that over the last eight years, companies have shifted $65 billion in annual spending away from traditional advertising channels and spent it on “page content, Web analytics, search engine optimization and site design.”
$65 billion is a huge number. Here’s how Anthea put it in context for Forbes:
To scale that, compare the total U.S. TV and cable advertising revenue for 2009, which is about $66 billion. The marketing dollars companies now spend on their own sites is equivalent to all TV ad revenue for the year. Eight years ago we said that the Global 2000 would be the dot-coms of tomorrow. That’s what’s playing out.
She says the shift is why she agrees with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s assement that global advertising isn’t just in a recession but has been “reset” at a lower level.
“Advertising which has left the news industries is not going to come back in its same shape or form.”
Read Anthea’s Q&A at Forbes >
