BBC's Mark Thompson finds it a tough task in the NYT world of advertising
The magnitude of the task facing former BBC Director General Mark Thompson at the New York Times, where advertising plays such a key role, has became apparent this week after the company posted its 13th straight quarterly decline in ad revenue.
Tough at the Times for Thompson
That was down 1.3% in the fourth quarter compared to the same period last year. Digital was flat with a 0.2% drop . Print was off 1.6%.
“That’s an improvement from previous quarters in 2013, when ad-revenue losses were steeper, but not yet the kind of growth that the Times needs to rediscover,” said AdAge.
The Times said programmatic ad tech and a "glut" of online inventory were undermining its digital ad revenue.It expects ad revenue in the first quarter of 2013 to be roughly the same as in the fourth quarter.
Thompson said the native ad units it introduced in January, part of an industrywide trend toward ads that mimic the surrounding editorial , are already driving increased advertising revenue.
The Times is clearly labelling its native ads as such, something it "remains committed to," he said. "But we're also heavily focused on advertising innovation as traditional banner advertising becomes a smaller contributor to revenue industry wide."
Mobile ad revenue is still only a "modest percentage" of the overall, the company said. Video is also in the early stages, Thompson noted. "We've got a long build on video," he said.
Advertising losses were partially offset by the addition of 33,000 digital-only subscribers. Total revenue for the fourth quarter increased 0.4% compared with the quarter a year earlier. Circulation revenue climbed 2.7% thanks to an increase in prices for home delivery as well as a 19% boost in digital subscriptions. The Times now has about 760,000 digital subscribers, it said.
Total revenue fell 5.2% in the quarter to $443.9 million, dragged down by a 6.3% drop in advertising. Digital-advertising revenue,long seen as a potential source of advertising growth, fell 6.5%
On a conference call with analysts, Times Co. executives blamed the declines in online ad revenue on a "glut" of Web ad inventory and increased use by marketers of so-called programmatic automated ad-buying systems, which have led to price declines.
Circulation revenue, now the publisher's largest source of revenue, fell 3.9% from a year earlier. Excluding the impact of an additional week in the year-earlier period, circulation revenue would have been up 2.7%. The Times reported a 19% jump in paid subscribers to its digital-only subscription packages as well as increases in home delivery prices. The company added 33,000 net additional digital subscribers in the quarter.