Media

These Desperate Advertisement Times

Kristine Lowe

20 Jul 2009 — 2 min read

Some believe "confidence is creeping back on the menu" at adlands lunch tables, which should also benefit of the starving media hounds so dependent on those almighty ad masters in the end, but, so far, not much evidence of that is forthcoming.

For one, as the first media company I've seen, Metro International posted second quarter earnings today - and it made for pretty gloomy reading. I'll return to that later, but, in the meantime, here's a quick look at what it actually looks like out there in media-ad-land:

Whenever I'm forced to use news sites - I get most of my news via RSS and Twitter, but unfortunately the latter often takes me through to news sites - I often find myself thinking that advertisement also comes with news content these days. Sometimes I'm even so turned off by wading through all the advertisement I give up trying to read that particular article.

I know these are desperate time, but with news sites turning their frontpages into ads; running whole page ads you have to watch before you get to the article and inundating you with pop-up ads in the form of cars, planes and other forms of creative advertisement running over the text when you finally get to the article you've got to wonder.

You'd think at least they earn good money when the ad takeup is so good as on the site featured below, but rumours have it that, at least in the Norwegian market, the competition for the advertiser's gold is so stiff that rebates are massive. My sources tell me one of the country's big media companies offer as much as 80 per cent rebate on listed advertisement prices. 80 per cent, that sounds like madness to my ears.

Now I don't follow the Dutch advertisement market closely, other than reading certain media company reports, but I had a hard time reading this article and would've given up if it wasn't for the topic:

With both these news sites the advertisement saturation is such that it's actually hard to avoid clicking on ads, Hans Kullin has looked at the all too similar situation in Sweden and Denmark.

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