This edition of The USIM Gazette® features articles on online display ad CPMs, recent broadcasting TV advertising performance and interesting industry statistics from Nielsen Online.
Many media outlets are still suffering badly under the weight of the economic downturn. For instance, take a quick gander at the newspaper and magazine industry. Newspaper advertisement sales slumped 29 percent in the quarter ended June 30, 2009. Newspaper ad losses have intensified in each of the last 12 quarters, amounting to the worst declines in newspaper history. The USIM Gazette® has documented some of the industry’s ailments in previous articles, such as in “Tomorrow’s Technology Now? Trends Shaping Tomorrow’s Media Technology Today - Part 2,” where we discussed the declining nature of advertising inches and total advertising revenue (retail, national and classified), which are the primary measurements for a newspaper’s financial performance.
Magazines are in a sorry state also. For example, Conde Nast publications saw big ad revenue drops. Ad pages in the September 2009 issue of W plummeted 53 percent from September 2008, according to a recent Conde Nast report. Allure saw pages plunge 52 percent, Self surrendered 51 percent, Glamour lost 42 percent, Vogue slipped 37 percent, Details fell 35 percent, and GQ and Teen Vogue both collapsed 32 percent for the same comparison period.
What’s to be made of all this? You might say that the “recovery” is still in recovery. Perhaps by next year the newspaper and magazine industries will have better results to report, as maybe their financial stress is strictly due to the recession, and not deeper problems related to a structural shift in consumer demand for their products. Media is being slammed by a rare double whammy – both a worldwide media recession and a general downturn in the business cycle.
As always, your Gazette is here to report the latest media and advertising trends (good and bad, august and ignoble, depressing and inspiring) to you so that you have the latest media-related news to help you in your daily decision making process.
Darrell Woody
Editor-Digital Communications