There are some interesting numbers near the back of “The Scoop on Daily Newspaper in Canada,” a by-and-large promotional piece for dailies put out by the Canadian Newspaper Association.
The numbers are in a table about advertising revenue for a range of Canadian media for the years 2001-2006, which were not, by and large, weak economic times, other than the short recession that followed 9/11. All media, with the exception of trade magazines and community newspapers, are there. Digging into those numbers shows a couple of things that confirm the long-term trends for newspapers.
The short version: (1) daily newspaper advertising grew at a much slower rate than overall spending and at a slower rate than any other medium; and (2) market share for daily newspapers shrank more than any other medium.
The details:
The table is in dollars. When you do a little math and compare percentages, it emerges that daily newspapers aren’t doing as well as other media that were tracked. In 2001, daily newspapers accounted for 23.8 per cent of the total reported advertising revenues. By 2006, that was down to 20 per cent.
There was no comparable drop for other media. TV’s share was 24.2 per cent in 2001 and 23.5 per cent in 2006; radio was 12 per cent in 2001 and 11.7 per cent in 2006. The share that went to Yellow Pages was 9.9 per cent in 2001 and 9 per cent in 2006. Other media in the table — radio, general magazines and out-of-home advertising (which I presume means billboards and the like), all were more or less stable when you compare 2001 and 2006.
The only item on the list to show an increase was the internet, which went from 1 per cent of advertising revenue in 2001, to 7 per cent in 2006.
Much more worrisome, I would think, is the growth in revenue between 2001 and 2006. The overall growth in total advertising reported in the table was 31 per cent. Internet advertising grew by a whopping 104 per cent, but given the rapid development of the ‘net betwen 2001 and 2006 and its low share of ad revenue in 2001, that’s not surprising.
Radio and out-of-home advertising revenue matched the overall increase at 31 per cent. Television and catalogues/direct mail more or less held their own at a 27 per cent increase, and general magazines increased ad revenue by 26 per cent. Yellow Pages advertising revenue increased by 20 per cent.
Daily newspapers didn’t come close to tracking the overall advertising increase. The increase reported for dailies: 11 per cent. (Daily newspaper revenue was still substantial in 2006 — $2.8 billion, second only to TV’s $3.2 billion.)
Six years is enough, I think, to delineate a trend, in this case one that shows Canadian daily newspapers losing share of overall market while their ad revenues grows considerably slower than the growth in overall ad spending. And, as well as Canadian newspapers are currently doing compared to what’s happening south of the border, neither of those can be a good thing.
Currently playing in iTunes: Xenaki Eimai Ke Tha’rtho by Eleni Vitali
Tags: advertising, business, canada, daily newspapers
