NWN Media, which publishes titles including the Evening Leader and the Chester Standard, has become the latest regional media group to partner with property search engine Nestoria for its property listings.
Prior to signing up the Johnston Press division, the start-up has made deals with fellow regional newspaper group Archant and the Independent.
It’s also partnered with listings sites Zoopla and PropertyNews.com.
(Picked up from Brand Republic) The Sun is offering free job advertising to businesses online.
The move is part of the title’s newly launched campaign against UK unemployment (or ‘Sunemployment’ as it shall now be known).
According to the website, the Sun has been ‘bombarded with calls from employers earlier today begging our readers to fill thousands of empty jobs’.
A few points here:
The Norwich-based publisher Archant has announced a 61.1 per cent fall in operating profits for the year up to June 2009, despite a rise in digital revenues.
Archant, which runs a range of daily and weekly titles in East Anglia, London and the south west of the UK, made £14.8 million in operating cuts so far this year, according to the figures released over the weekend.
The group’s newspaper and printing operations saw a 25.3 per cent decrease in profits over the same period to £49.1 million, while magazine profits were down by 22.2 per cent to £21.7 million.
In contrast, the company’s digital revenues increased by 18.9 per cent – but this rise was not enough to offset the downturn in traditional revenues for the publisher.
“Adjusting to this new and different world and restoring levels of profitability will take time. We remain confident of our ability to exploit the many opportunities to do so, utilising our powerful brands and building on our relationships with our readers and advertisers,” said chairman Richard Jewson in the release.
Specialist magazine publisher Future has reported a resilient and ‘healthy balance sheet’ in the face of recession with a 15 per cent increase in online advertising revenue in the nine months to June 30.
The company released an interim management statement today, which suggested that although print advertising revenues were down 8 per cent, this was offset by the growth in online advertising – resulting in a total fall of only 4 per cent.
Online ads represented 22 per cent, nearly a quarter, of total advertising revenue – up 19 per cent year-on-year – over the same period.
In the company’s interim report, CEO Stevie Spring said: “While it is premature to talk about a market recovery, there has been no deterioration in trading conditions since the half year.”
A third of the group’s revenue comes from its US operation and it capitalised on a favourable US exchange rate against the sterling with a 24 per cent stronger US dollar in the reported period.
As a result, the publisher had come out relatively unscathed through what it called ‘exceptionally challenging market conditions’, with an overall revenue decline of just 2 per cent, or 9 per cent calculated on a constant currency basis.
Publishing revenues
In the UK, which generates the remaining two thirds of the company’s income, publishing revenue, based on constant currency, was down 6 per cent. The fall in revenue was mainly due to a decline in PC gaming, personal computing and automotive titles, the report suggested.
In the same period, publishing revenues for the US operation fell 13 per cent, on a constant currency basis. The publisher blamed ‘greater exposure to generic advertising market volatility’ in the territory, particularly with regard to its digital business.
Future’s future
Future produces more than 80 newsstand magazines, 62 websites and 25 annual live events on special-interest topics, such as computer games, film, music and sport.
Spring, who according to paidContent:UK, ‘never talks down the health of the magazine industry’, was bullish about the future of the publisher:
“I am confident that when recovery comes, Future is well-positioned to benefit. We’ve continued to invest in both new products and new people and, more broadly, our strategy remains firmly on track. We are in the best shape we can be in for the mid-term,” he said.
Future’s annual results for the year to end of September will be announced on November 26.
The plunge has already been pretty terrifying for a range of companies from Yahoo and IAC to the newspapers,” writes Gawker founder Nick Denton, referring to his previous prediction that media companies should prepare for a 40 per cent downturn in advertising revenue over the economic cycle.
“But I was wrong in one respect: a few premium internet brands, Gawker’s among them, have withstood the advertising apocalypse.”
Readers of the Observer might have noticed that the paper no longer prints a full television guide each week. Many have written to the paper to complain. One said that a full guide would be ‘infinitely preferable to part two of a Spanish or Italian CD, which is both incomplete and of absolutely no use to me.’
Yesterday Stephen Pritchard, the readers’ editor for the Observer, part of Guardian News&Media, explained:
“The figures are stark. With advertising revenue set to plummet 26 per cent this year and circulation down 6.9 per cent on last year, the Observer, like other newspapers, is having to make painful decisions about what it can afford to print. Loyal readers have displayed remarkable forbearance recently as the news, business and sport sections have gradually slimmed down but they could contain themselves no longer when the TV guide disappeared.”
(…) “This is not a decision we took lightly and it is a source of real regret to us,” wrote the editor, John Mulholland, in reply to complainants. “This was just one of the host of difficult decisions we have had to make in recent weeks. Newspapers and media groups are facing the most difficult trading conditions imaginable. Not only are we suffering from the catastrophic fallout from the credit crunch in terms of severely reduced advertising revenues but, additionally, our industry is undergoing structural change which is causing enormous disruption.”
According to a new report from Borrell Associates, local advertisers and businesses will make up 74 per cent of Facebook’s ad revenue this year – around $229 million.
Mashable points out that Facebook makes geographic targeting of ads particularly easy. But the proportion is significantly higher than the amount of revenue from local advertisers expected for MySpace and Twitter.
Media Week reports: “Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) has formed closer ties with celebrity title Hello!, having agreed that its digital unit Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) will handle online ad sales for Hellomagazine.com.”
The global advertising recession will a new low point in the second half of 2009, dropping by 8.5 per cent this year, according to a new report from ZenithOptimedia, reports MediaGuardian.co.uk.
Western Europe and North America will be most affected, suggests the forecast, which can be downloaded in full at this link.
Elsewhere in the industry, Guy Parker, chief of the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency, has predicted a greater number of complaints relating to fewer campaigns in 2009.
In 2008 ASA received 26,433 complaints about 15,556 ads, but 2009 could see more than 30,000, says Parker.
Across the pond Broadcasting & Cable reports that four major US ad associations have joined forces to issue a set of guidelines on behavioral advertising – most significantly a ruling requiring internet service providers and desktop app software, such as web browser tool bars, to ask a user to opt-in before engaging in behavioral ads.
In case you haven’t yet seen it, here’s some more free publicity for the Economist – the publication’s new advert asking us to let our minds wander (or legs, perhaps, to the newsagent.)
In June FoliMag reported that the Economist’s profits were up 26 per cent for the last fiscal year.
“The London-based company, which publishes its namesake magazine, reported approximately $92 million in operating profit, up 26 percent over the previous 12-month period. Revenue was up 17 percent to roughly $514.2 million.”
“The Economist’s worldwide circulation grew 6.4 percent during the period to 1,390,780, the company said. Ad revenue at Economist.com was up 29 percent while page views were up 53 percent.”
The Guardian, however, reported that overall advertising was down:
“Chris Stibbs, the Economist Group’s finance director, said that advertising across the company first turned negative in the final quarter of its financial year, between January and March 2009, and has continued to show a year-on-year decline since then.”
It attributed the profit-rise to recent job cuts:
“[T]he group has remained profitable thanks to a cost-cutting programme that has seen around 130 jobs cut – roughly one in 10 of the company’s global workforce – and leaving it with a staff of 1,100.”
NB: The Economist calls itself a newspaper, not a magazine: see the website for a lengthy description of its history.