News

Two companies increase their advertising duopoly by earning a combined $106.3bn, nearly double the figure of five years ago

The luxury magazine market, for so long a well-heeled haven from the turmoil facing the rest of the print media industry, could be about to confront the same headwinds battering other magazines and newspapers. Analysts say that glossy magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair are starting to see a shift in readers and advertisers to online social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. But they are also being hit by forces specific to the industry that has for so long offered them protection.

US and European publishers have given support to the idea of Google introducing an ad-blocker to its widely used Chrome internet browser despite fears it would hit their online advertising revenues. Details of the technology group’s plans have not been disclosed but Google has said it held “initial conversations” on the idea with publishers.

The Daily Telegraph is a rare beast: a British newspaper that makes healthy profits. All around it, the news industry is being upended by plunging revenues from print advertising and the migration of digital advertising to Facebook and Google. But in 2015, the Telegraph Media Group made a £48m pre-tax profit on a turnover of £320m, a slight improvement on the £46m it made in 2014. It is still Britain’s biggest-selling quality daily paper, though its print circulation has fallen from its peak of more than 1m papers a day in the early 2000s to 457,331 in February, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

Press Release: Future plc (LSE: FUTR, “the Group”), the international media group and leading digital business, provides a trading update for the six months to 31 March 2017. Overall trading for the year to date has been positive. The Group’s Media division is performing strongly with the fast growing revenue streams of e-commerce and events up around 70% and 15% year on year respectively. As a result the Board’s expectation for the Group’s results for both the first six months and the financial year as a whole remain uncharged

Press Release: Comexposium Group announced today that Simon Foster has been appointed as Chief Executive Officer as of August 2017. At that time, Renaud Hamaide will transition from CEO to Executive Chairman.

Haymarket Media Group is to invest £50m over the next three years and create more than 100 jobs in a new division, Haymarket Automotive

The Times has seen subscriptions sales jump 200 percent in the last year, since it pivoted from publishing on a breaking-news cycle to a digital editions-based publishing strategy a year ago. Subscriber churn is also at a record low, down 4 percentage points compared to the previous year, according to Catherine Newman, chief marketing officer at The Times and Sunday Times. Last summer, total print and digital paying subscribers rested at 413,600, according to the publisher. And in the first half of 2016, new paying-subscriber sales rose 200 percent compared to the first half of 2015

Over the past five years, Google and Facebook have cut a conquering swath through the market for digital advertising, snatching ever more business from legacy media companies, such as print newspapers and magazines. But a growing scandal involving the inadvertent placement of ads next to extremist content on Google’s YouTube video has raised questions about whether the balance of power is about to shift again.

Demand still far outstrips supply when it comes to premium digital video. That’s a challenge for advertisers – but it’s a hell of an opportunity for publishers

Publishers need to find additional sources of revenue and, worryingly, the new generation of so-called “distributed content” services, which held such promise a year ago, are not cutting the mustard. Services such as Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages were supposed to make it easier for publishers to monetise their journalism.

According to Liberium Informa (INF) could be hit by some of the same problems facing US educational publishers such as Pearson. Analyst Ian Whittaker reiterated his ‘hold’ recommendation and target price of 715p on the stock, which added 6.75p to close 1% up at 680p on Monday following full-year results.

The mad men and women of the ad industry have plenty of reasons to toss and turn at night. Money is increasingly trickling from television commercials to digital media — a market that Facebook and Google currently have in a duopolistic chokehold. Inter-agency competition is at a fever pitch. Unconventional upstarts are eating their lunch. If Don Draper were around today, there’s a good chance he’d work at Facebook. But it’s not internet advertising giants that keep the industry’s top chief up at night. Nor is it his three-month-old daughter. It’s…Amazon?

ESI Media has announced the launch of the London Evening Standard Food Month, a city-wide festival promoting the diversity of London’s food scene.

The festival will encompass hundreds of events throughout June and will include contributions from chefs, restaurants, food trucks, cafes and bars. The centrepiece of the festival will be the Night Market, an outdoor dining experience in a London park featuring up to 50 restaurants, food trucks, bars and live entertainment.

The erosion in print ad sales kicked off at the beginning of 2016 and did not let up. In the fourth quarter alone, print sales dropped 20 per cent at the New York Times and at McClatchy, operator of 29 US daily papers. Gannett, owner of USA Today, reported a 15 per cent fall in the US and a 14 per cent decline at Newsquest, its UK chain. News Corp said the fall in print dragged total ad revenue down 29 per cent at News UK (publisher of The Sun and The Times), 20 per cent at Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones and 12 per cent at its Australian papers. The Financial Times and Tronc, the owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, have also been hit.

Axel Springer is to expand its mobile news service Upday from four to 16 countries in Europe this year, as the German media group accelerates its shift into digital publishing. Upday, a news aggregator that uses human editors as well as an algorithm to select news stories, was developed as part of an exclusive partnership with Samsung and launched in Germany, Poland, the UK and France last February.

Roy Greenslade’s final blog: When I started this blog in 2006, Twitter was three months old and Facebook was on the verge of providing public access. Google was up and running, turning a profit, and just beginning to destroy the business model of newspapers

Son of Vincent Bolloré gets more power at ad agency as tie-up with Vivendi seems near

Sky is to make its full TV service of hundreds of channels available without the need for a satellite dish for the first time, as it looks to stem customer defections to rivals such as BT

Revenue pressures, such as shrinking advertising sales, seem to be constantly intensifying for the print media sector.