Newspapers continue to be the number one medium in terms of advertising revenue in New Zealand, snapping up a 32.8% share of the NZ$2.317 billion market for 2008, according to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
New Zealand’s newspaper readership is holding steady despite the growing popularity of online news sources, with the Nielsen Media readership figures for the year ending 31 March 2009 showing that average readership for the nation’s five metropolitan dailies – The New Zealand Herald, Dominion Post, The Press, Waikato Times and Otago Daily Times – was up by 15,000 year-on-year.
Yet, as is the case with their print counterparts in magazines, newspapers are losing ad revenue. According to the ASA, newspaper ad revenue was down 8% year-on-year in 2008, dropping from NZ$826 million to NZ$760 million. Newspapers share of total advertising revenue dropped as well, down from 35.4% in 2007 to 32.8% in 2008.
The economic downturn is biting hard, with publishers making staff cuts. Fairfax’s Suburban Newspapers division, which publishes 18 titles in the Auckland region, has asked staff to consider nine-day fortnights. General manager David Penny says: “Support from affected staff over this proposed move has been very high as they clearly understand the need to protect the success they have all worked so hard to achieve.”
APN News & Media, which publishes The New Zealand Herald, the country’s most-read newspaper with a readership of 586,000, as well as regional dailies and community titles, is also finding the going tough. APN credited “reasonable results” in the fourth quarter of December 2008 to the packaging of ad deals across its newspapers and magazines.
“Newspapers in New Zealand have come off some very good years of growth with strong revenue, but right now the depressed market is making the going very tough,” says Newspaper Advertising Bureau general manager Robert Munro.
Newspaper Publishers Association president Michael Muir stresses the positives: “Like all media, newspapers have experienced a drop in advertising over the past six months. But it’s important to note that we still lead the market.”
Almost certainly the biggest challenge facing newspapers – outside of the global financial downturn – is the encroachment of online news sources. Newspapers’ share of total advertising revenue dropped in 2008 for the fifth straight year. By comparison, interactive media continues to steal ad revenue share, rising from 5.8% in 2007 to 8.3% in 2008.
While this figure is not restricted to online news sites, it does paint a picture of the conundrum facing newspapers: how to manage online in order to ensure it keeps its share of the advertising pie, or indeed, grow it under the overall masthead?
Online readership of New Zealand newspaper sites has doubled over the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research Market Intelligence. This, says Munro, is a positive influence, with “online adding additional readers rather than reducing the print figure”.
Indeed, online readership in New Zealand seems to lag Australia by a fair whack – across the week, for example, Nzherald.co.nz is the nation’s best read online paper, but despite this attracts just 26,000 readers that do not also read the printed version. Other top newspapers possess even smaller online-only readerships, illustrating the resilience of the New Zealand print market.
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