2016 was worst year yet for print industry, new SMI numbers reveal
Australia’s print sector had another grim year in 2016, new data has confirmed.
Standard Media Index – seen as Australia’s most reliable barometer of advertising spending – today released its numbers to the market for the full calendar year. The numbers indicate that consumer magazine advertising revenues fell by 18% compared to 2015.
Meanwhile, newspapers were almost as badly hit, with metropolitan titles down 14%, regional titles down 5% and community titles down 8%. Revenues for magazines inserted into newspapers were also down 18%.
Revenue for mainstream Australian magazine titles will continue to fall as long as the industry remains scared to innovate in order to appeal to a smarter, younger demographic. It’s time to ditch the boomers. Something needs to be done about the outlets for said titles too. Again, retail needs to innovate and push independent titles to the fore. This is where the interest is now.
No Michael, the same level of fuckedness applies to each age group I’m afraid.
I’d like to see a comparison between publication (both “paper” and digital) revenues and what vendors spend on PR. From where I sit, that is where the $ are going.
I’m curious, can anyone please explain to me why print is seeing so much money pulled out of it by agencies? This seems to be accelerating, faster than readers moving away from the medium, and I am just wondering what the drivers are behind the shift in spend?
Dave, advertisers and agencies are not ahead of the audience exodus, they are just trying to catch up with it. The audience left before advertisers heard about it. Now it’s just rationalization with some better options available elsewhere to boot.
If the audiences have left, then surely that adjustment has already been made to reflect the change in consumption. Looking at the 12 months to September M-F metro pubs (to avoid duped data – I don’t have the databases to run the complete report), there was a cumulative decline in circ of approx 7% and a drop in readership (Roy Morgan, to avoid the EMMA debate too) of around 4%. Yet the decline in spend in the medium was 14%.
My readership has increased and yet my advertising revenue has dropped so I concur with Dave.
“Online video advertising grew by 11% to just over $100m.”
This is surely way way off??
Hi “Video”,
That’s a good point. This refers to the “pure play video” line, and obviously it’s a much bigger category in conjunction with other forms of digital.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Yes that figure is incorrect…they didn’t check it with us before publishing and clearly I didn’t provide it. Jane
The decline of print advertising is hardly news…and for years news media publishers have led all other traditional media in monetising their quality content online such that Digital revenues now represent more than 30% of total Agency spend to news media publishers (and that’s excluding programmatic spend so the level is likely to be even higher). Similarly, bookings to Online Magazines grew 41% from CY2015. And your view on the low growth in `Content Sites’ bookings disguises the 8.8% growth in bookings to websites in the News/Weather genre and the 18.5% growth in Business/Finance sites. But some genres, such as Technology sites, reported lower ad spend in CY2016. It’s a big, complex media world out there so please call for more context next time before rushing to publish a (very old) headline…
Thanks for the additional context Jane – and will do.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
When Mumbrella launched, the news was very positive. A breath of fresh air and almost a counter-culture feel, in a sometimes negative media space.
Tim, what happened to the values of the good old days?!
Right about now I bet the magazines wish they could snuff out SMI the way they did the Audit Bureau last year!
Reporting such things in percentage growth/decline has no relativity or relevance without the actual raw number reference points.
This is like saying Blackberry sales increased 100% when in reality they went from 10k units to 20k units, compared to Nokia who had 25% increase in sales going from 100k to 125k… thats a 250% increase over Blackberry!
But thats all hypothetical… data and its sources can be sliced and diced any way FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE.. and is the point of segmentation and various personality and cognitive function tests.
The below results reflect consumer responses by top level media channel by retail category:
http://bit.ly/2eUOAci
Unfortunately, most marketing strategists and media buyers don’t realise that looking at all channels holistically for a multi-channel approach actually resembles “Last-Click Attribution” and in this case can be called “Last Channel Attribution”. Ever notice when you something you’ve always coveted, you start noticing more of it?
If anyone would like to discuss this further, please contact me via LinkedIn.