Watch this Space Issue 38

Another batch of marvellous media news for you all. Enjoy.

Don’t worry: it’s not just you

If it’s any consolation, media owners’ pockets are also being hit hard this summer. The slump in the property market as well as a similar downturn in the motors market, fueled (sorry) by rising prices at the pumps, have both put a substantial dent into revenues from papers’ classified sections. With less money in peoples’ pockets, revenue from circulation is also dropping off. Evincing financial strife as worrying as any other publisher, Trinity Mirror recently announced a 15% year on year decline in revenue.

On the national level, The Sun has announced a reduction in its cover price to 30p from 35p. Already sold at the lower value in Scotland, London and the South East, the paper will now cost 30p nationwide, as part of a "credit crunch defying cut" (top red-top in paper price slash shocker).

Daily Mail Does The Splits

It’s now possible to target the Daily Mail’s quality readership without having to mortgage your kids! Whereas until recently regional splits were only available on a North/South basis, or very occasionally as a North West/North East & Yorkshire split, you can now break the southern distribution up into four separate areas.

Captain Kickback says: "Since the Mail’s readership is weighted heavily towards the South, buying into this half of the country has long been prohibitively expensive for many. Breaking up the southern distribution allows the advertiser a cheaper, more focused way to access all those up-market Mail readers."

E-Metro

Free commuter tabloid Metro is now available in full online. While a number of other publishers offer a similar product in return for a subscription fee, the E-Metro is the first free-of-charge online national newspaper. Print editions of the paper carry advertisements inviting the reader to sign up for an email each day with a link to that day’s paper.

Captain Kickback says: "This is a terrific data capture opportunity for Metro, and no doubt they will make this audience available to the advertiser. Watch this space for more details."

Not All Bad News for Outdoor

Figures just released for quarter 2 revealed a year on year decrease in ad spend on outdoor media for the third successive quarter. However, the decline of 1.6% was less than seen during quarter one of this year, and some analysts are expecting to see this turned into a growth in the market by the end of 2008. Although the medium's share of adspend has been in decline, to the benefit of the likes of online media and radio, the decline in ad spend over recent months follows six years of consecutive and substantial quarterly growth in revenues. The fall during quarter 2 was mostly down to a 39.4% drop in outdoor advertising spend by food producers and retailers, although increased spends from other areas, such as financial and motors, helped to offset this.

Midlands Radio Stations for Sale

Having acquired GCAP Media, radio group Global Radio has announced plans to sell off most of its stations in the Midlands in order to avoid a referral to the Competition Commission. The stations likely to go on the market include GCAP’s BRMB, Beacon, Mercia and Wyvern, as these target an audience similar to that of the group’s existing Heart and Galaxy stations. Although there were also overlaps in London, with the new group owning Heart, LBC and Capital, the OFT has agreed that there was no monopoly here as each station targets a different audience group.

Hooray for the Credit Crunch!

At last, a positive consequence of all that manic over-lending. The Halifax has announced plans to shelve Howard, their resident singing idiot, in favour of a more serious advertising message. The idea is to adopt a tone more in keeping with a tougher, harder financial climate.

Captain Kickback says: " If belt tightening all-round means we won’t be subjected any longer to the glib wailings of a gurning talentless chucklewit, then I’m all for it."

That There Interweb

Always a useful mine of information that you didn't know you didn't know, the internet has come up trumps again. When looking at the popularity of specific terms put into search engines, we can see a keen correlation between the rise and fall of a given market and the number of times its related search terms are used. The recent difficulties in the property market, for example, have seen a similar downturn in the number of people searching for 'house prices'. At the same time, the number of searches for 'house price crash' have trebled over the last year. The few remaining people searching for 'house prices' are these days more likely to click on news websites for information on the market, whereas before it was property sites that got the most attention, perhaps suggesting that whereas people used to search for this term to find out by how much their house has increased in value, they now search to check the news and find out just how bad things have become.

More Good News

On a par with the disappearance of Howard from our screens is the announcement of another new website set to offer a service to rival Rightmove's. The National Association of Estate Agents has announced plans to create its own online property portal. Dubbed Property Live (someone cleary spent a good five or six minutes thinking that one up), the website will be launched in October with the backing of the Association's 10,000 members. If the new site finds its feet and demonstrates its worth, the likes of Rightmove and FindaProperty may have to re-examine their business models.

Captain Kickback says: "Although there are no plans for this new site to cater for property developers, its success might still be good news for builders, as it would make their custom all the more valuable to existing property portals. There's a long way to go though: Rightmove in particular is a massively powerful tool which offers a lot more to its estate agents than a simple listings facility, and Property Live has a job on its hands if it is to compete on an even keel. This move does smell a bit of desparation in a struggling market: the number of leads estate agents get through Rightmove will have dropped off massively over the last 6-8 months, just as it will have for other platforms, and although Property Live will definitely save them money, there's no reason to suspect it will be able to tap into a secret gold mine of cash-rich and well-postitioned purchasers."


That's your lot for another month. If you'd like more details on anything discussed here, feel free to reply to this email, or speak to your Space and Time team.


See you next time!!

Captain Kickback