SMI: July sees falls across the board following last year’s record highs
The ad market in July was down with the total down 10.4 per cent, or $67.2 million, to $580.3 million following last year’s record high which was driven by federal government spending.
The latest Standard Media Index (SMI) data shows that that there was a 65.8 per cent decrease in government advertising compared with last year, where Labor and Liberal Party advertising accounted for $37.1m ahead of the Federal Election.
Among the major TV networks the Seven Network had a 40.2 per cent share of free-to-air TV revenues (up from 38.7 per cent last year), Nine had a 38.8 per cent (up from 38 per cent) and Ten was 21 per cent (down from 23.4 per cent last year), despite an uptick in ratings for its Commonwealth Games coverage and the latter stages of Masterhchef.
The result puts Seven top of the ladder for revenue January-July 2014 with 41.6 per cent, Nine with 38.1 per cent and Ten with 20.3 per cent.
The downturn in government advertising saw all media impacted with metropolitan television down 12.6 per cent to $212.1m while subscription television was down 24.4 per cent to $30.4m.
Radio was down 8.8 per cent while newspapers were down 12.4 per cent to $61.6m and magazines were down 16.9 per cent to $17.2m.
Outdoor advertising was the only major media to record an improvement with spend up 2.5 per cent to $56.1m while digital, which normally consistently rises, posted a 2.3 per cent decline recording $101.9m. However late bookings are expected to turn this into a positive result. Cinema fell dramatically year-on-year down 45 per cent recording $3.9m of revenue from the media agencies.
According to SMI total agency bookings are down 2.3 per cent in the calendar year-to-date.
Nic Christensen
So newspaper ads again down double digits. So why are the publishers telling shareholders the revenues are off 1-2% in forecast? Or is it Fairfax getting huge sub revenues all if a sudden?
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measure for measure, they don’t measure direct advertisers of which press takes the majority of their revenue. Also it does’t include the Harvey Norman’s of the world and other minor agencies. Therefore the media that rely more on direct are under reported and as such SMI is flawed
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@ measure for measure: fairfax sub revenue is looking better, partly the result of getting rid of unprofitable circ and helped (but only a little) by digital subscriptions. However this is nowhere near enough to offset decline in print ad revenues. Fairfax revenues were very much helped by the big increase in revenues from Domain, which is masking the poor results from its publishing divisions (metro and regional)
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The last line of the article is the only one really relevant. Comparing monthly totals to same month last year is apples and oranges because of timing of different events – eg easter, election, comm games, etc that are in one year and not the other.
On a YTD basis this all comes out in the wash, and I note the total YTD is only 2.3% down.
Would be interesting to break down the YTD totals into gains/losses for 7, 9, 10, as well as for YTD movements for tv vs print, mags, ooh, etc. That would be a more relevant statistic to report on
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good call @houso
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