In what may be an early indicator of broader Web advertising trends, the New York Times announced today that it saw total Internet advertising revenues decline 3.8 percent in November. This compares to a total decrease of 21.2 percent for all advertising at media company, most of which is print advertising. The New York Times releases financial data on a monthly basis, and this was the first time it has reported an actual decrease in Internet advertising revenues. (Internet advertising revenues for the year through November are still up 11.6 percent).
The NYT’s digital properties, which include NYTimes.com, Boston.com, and About.com, attracted 47 million unique visitors in November and collectively would have been the 16th largest site on the Web, according to comScore. In the third quarter, online advertising ground to a halt at the largest Web companies.
But most analysts are still arguing about the extent of the slowdown, not whether online advertising revenues will actually go down like other types of advertising. Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth, for instance, recently revised his 2009 Internet advertising revenue growth numbers down from 17 percent to 6 percent. But that might still be too optimistic.
That said, we still need more data points before any conclusions can be made about the fourth quarter or next year. The New York Times is not a perfect indicator of the overall advertising market. Most of its declines came from weakness in online classifieds, especially job and real-estate listings. On the positive side, its news sites actually saw an increase in display advertising in November. So there is some hope for other display advertisers.
Looking at November comScore stats for the NYTimes.com site alone, unique U.S. visitors were flat at 13 million was and pageviews were down 15 percent to 147 million (see charts below). Like many media sites, it is suffering from post-Election blues.
(Photo by matticgn).
Well it’s going to get worse only. Writing is on the wall for print media to see. Needless to say future lies with internet/online media…
-Anita CM
http://www.vantrix.net
Correction: Future is going to be bleak even for online media as well in these recessionary times…
Time to find recession-proof ways to pull in money.
This “recession” actually started in Dec 2007. Best not to jump in the recent media bandwagon and make things worse with suddenly dire predictions and advice on bomb-shelter strategies.
Prepare for the worst in all times good or bad, but always work towards the best !
NY was a big deal due to WWII. But technology, communication, air-travel diminished its geographic significance.
What do they know in NY that’s so special?
Do you seriously need to post a picture of a dead bird to make your point?
I thought dead birds never stand :p
No, that was just the first picture I found. I’ve switched it for a better one.
Doesn’t look dead to me, unless he changed the image after your comment
I decided against the dead canary. It is Christmas.
The updated one still looks kind of… crippled… Poor thing.
I want to see what Google’s numbers will be like, ads to Google is what oil is to Kuwait, 90% of their income
People were investing in online marketing blindly these past 5 years.
It’s only natural that in a slow down they are starting to look at actual ROI for their online dollars.
The general trend in online advertising was to throw money at it and see what happens instead of a comprehensive approach using metrics.
Or companies would pay SEO agencies who would then just do the same as a proxy for company managers who were too lazy to waste the cash themselves.
I don’t think this will effect Google as they have so many monetization avenues, but it could definitely hurt the NYT and LA Times.
Hey Chris, what do you mean by ROI?
Return On Investment
Chris,
What are Google’s many monetization avenues? Could you please elaborate.
I think mobile computers could really help the New York Times. Instead of reading the paper at the breakfast table, I use my iPhone. I wonder what the growth in advertising was for their mobile site.
I’ve never liked newspapers, I’ll admit it.
I hope at some point there is a cost effective Kindle-like device that’ll beam the newspaper down to me for a subscription fee.
Well, they should follow the path what denverpost.com and washingtonpost.com did. They have been using searchles’ related user widgets on their site to increase user interaction. After all, It is now about having loyal users and connect the like minded one on a site.
They have a new social network feature called TimesPeople. I think they said on their last conference call that it has over 100,000 users.
The title of your post is way off. It should be more like “Juggernaut In The Coalmine…”
The canary would be a site like yours, that has a dedicated and targeted audience.
Just another bubble bursting and we are likely going to overshoot on the downside just as we did on the upside. I recall Doubleclick dropping from 135/share down to below 10 in the 2000-2005 time frame after bubble burst. Everyone saying online ads were worthless. Hellman & Friedman buys them for $1.1 billion, spins off some assets for some nice quick cash shortly thereafter, and two years later sells to Google of $3.1 billion. It’s the end of this bubble, but not the end of the world and we’ll likely see a rebound and bubbles in the future. Happy holidays.
Sure. That’s how humans function – always looking for something to be excited about – hence all the bubbles that have been and all those to come. Anyone who thinks that this is the end of the world has not lived long enough.
1. Chart 2 shows very considerable reduction in page views in Nov-08 – one would not be suprised this to affect revenues (if they are based on pageviews, which is not that far off readership coverage in case of print media).
2. One the same chart one can see large increase in page views in the last few months – this may have been achieved by using unnatural means that resulted in effective dillution of value of such page views to advertisers so they would be more likely to offer less money for the same 1000 views.
3. Online revenues dropped much lower than offline – during recession advertising gets cut first, if anything it is good news (for online media) that online revenues hold up better than offline.
Conclusion: given recession and taking into account other things, this information can be interpreted as fairly good news for online media.
Rant: If this was December 2007, well before the events of this year, then maybe it would have been reasonable to use the canary analogy. It’s too late now as the mine shafts have been blown up already. Who cares about the canary when half the mine is on fire? At this point miners (that survived) care about prospects of fire being put out and maybe saving some of their collegues if that’s possible at all.
I wouldn’t draw many conclusions from this data point. This story is more about classified ads than online advertising generally.
I wouldn’t read into this too much. Boston.com let go of their entire digital sales team sometime this fall.
Yep, sad, very sad…
well, they should have let go of their printing plants. NYT Co has about a dozen throughout the country. I call that suicidal.
Ad rates must go up significantly to match and even exceed print ad rates.
The chickens have come home to roost.
The partisans the NYT caters to won’t be around in non-political times, nor will those that seek objective journalism, and certainly not those stung by its spins.
Can any business survive that intentionally offends potential customers?
Print decline is old, old news. Online decline during recession is old news, it’s the same as happened last time.
Its only expected that online ad spend will go down, after all advertising is a bit of a discretionary good its not like rental expense or utilities. But overall, its still a growth area and probably an area that will recover extremely quick. There’s still a lot of potential as will as discovery in the space.
It’s gonna keep getting worse. And it’s not only the general business climate. The content in New York Times is off-the-scale liberal. They’ve lost a lot of people by not being a credible source for news. Advertisers can see it too.
I think two major factors to consider when looking at these numbers:
1. The Election
2. The Auto Industry
If you think about it, how much revenue was lost when the election was over and all those political campaigns suddenly stopped?
Also, the auto industry is one of the biggest online advertisers for large scale sites that serve a very broad market. With the turmoil in the auto industry right now, it’s only natural to think they would begin be pulling back their online advertising as well.
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Well, they should follow the path what denverpost.com and washingtonpost.com did. They have been using searchles’ related user widgets on their site to increase user interaction. After all, It is now about having loyal users and connect the like minded one on a site