{"id":136,"date":"2008-12-30T12:26:30","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T20:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/merry-christmas-news-industry-nice-knowin-ya-good-luck-with-that-50-80-ad-revenue-decline-for-2009\/"},"modified":"2008-12-30T12:26:30","modified_gmt":"2008-12-30T20:26:30","slug":"merry-christmas-news-industry-nice-knowin-ya-good-luck-with-that-50-80-ad-revenue-decline-for-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/merry-christmas-news-industry-nice-knowin-ya-good-luck-with-that-50-80-ad-revenue-decline-for-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Merry Christmas, News Industry! Nice Knowin’ Ya! Good Luck with that 50-80% Ad Revenue Decline for 2009!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Arrington apparently wants my morning coffee to wind up on the keyboard. <\/a><\/p>\n

Display advertising revenue is going to fall of a cliff in January
according to a number of content sites I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve spoken with who rely on
advertising for revenue. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Sales through December were mostly strong as advertisers used up their marketing budgets,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em> said one sales exec. But, he added, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153there are few buyers for this next fiscal quarter, and those few that are buying are looking for steep discounts.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em><\/p>\n

Just how bad will it be? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve heard estimates of 30%-80% revenue
drops over the next three months from companies that serve a variety of
content (games sites, tech news, celebrity news, political news, etc.).
The median pessimism point is around 50%. The people I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve spoken with
work at large public companies and small one-person blog shops.
Absolutely no one I spoke with said they expect an up quarter.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Translation: If you work at any sort of media outlet, there’s about a 50-50 shot that the next few months will involve putting the little plastic baggies on your hands and trudging to work down at Quizno’s to make sammiches. <\/p>\n

According to Ad Age, the meltdown that started in newspapers (article headline: “Media Jobs? Depressing)<\/a>… <\/p>\n

\n

U.S. media have cut 196,200 or 18.6% of jobs since employment in that sector peaked in the 2000 dot-com bubble. More than half the cuts (109,700) came from newspapers. Media employment fell by 3.1% (27,600 jobs) from the start of the recession in December 2007 through October 2008. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

…is about to hit the ad agencies in a big, big way: <\/a><\/p>\n

\n

More cuts are likely; Omnicom Group did major cuts in December. While economists guess the recession will end in the second half of 2009, the U.S. job market — including the agency sector — could get stuck in another extended “jobless recovery.” <\/p>\n

Investors have soured on the agency sector. Combined market capitalization of the Big Four agency firms<\/a> — Omnicom, WPP, Interpublic Group of Cos., Publicis Groupe — in December 2008 was $23.4 billion, not dramatically above the June 2007 market cap of WPP alone ($18.3 billion). <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Looked at this way, the newspaper contractions have been the “canaries in the coalmine” in the media industry, and the next 9 months or so are going to see a lot of other people sharing the fate of the ink-stained wretches.<\/a> Which is not good news for newspaper people who are getting downsized, and who haven’t given a lot of thought as to what they can do next.  All the prescriptions & nostrums that have been offered thus far – start up your own hyper-local news website & start selling ads to local merchants – are not going to be possible when said local merchants are closing their doors and\/or eliminating their discretionary ad budgets.  <\/p>\n

I’m sure the coming months will hear wails & howls from the ad folks like those we’ve been hearing from the news side. However – like in the news business – those advertising professionals who are on top of the latest trends,<\/a> and who have trained themselves to have multiple skills – they will survive. <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Technorati Tags: ad revenue decline<\/a>, newspapers crisis<\/a>, online ad decline<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Arrington apparently wants my morning coffee to wind up on the keyboard. Display advertising revenue is going to fall of a cliff in Januaryaccording to a number of content sites I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve spoken with who rely onadvertising for revenue. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Sales through December were mostly strong as advertisers used up their marketing budgets,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said one sales […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[18,61,36,854],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-migration","category-newspaper-deathwatch","tag-dead-cat-bounce","tag-denial-of-reality","tag-monetizing-mobile-content","tag-newspaper-deathwatch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}