Evening Standard reports £11.5m loss amid ‘tightening’ ad market
The Evening Standard newsbrand has slumped to a reported £11.5m pre-tax loss in the year to the end of September 2018 amid an ever more cut-throat advertising market, extending a continuous run of losses since 2016.
Evening Standard slumps to £11.5m loss amid ‘tightening’ ad market
Bankrolled by Russian billionaire Evgeny Lebedev and stewarded by its high-profile editor, former chancellor George Osborne, the tabloid is distributed for free across the capital each day with some 860,000 copies dished out.
Despite spilling yet more red ink there was some good news behind the headline figure, with revenues increasing by 2% to £65m, sufficient to cut an operating loss by 5% year-on-year to £9.5m.
This indicates that recent cost-saving measures, including job losses and a merger of its print and online operations, maybe having the desired effect. Another bright spot lay in digital revenues which grew by 29% courtesy of a 21% jump in UK readers and a 48% boost to its global audience over the period.
The Evening Standard is caught in a wider malaise afflicting the publishing sector which has suffered from a steady bleed of readers and advertisers to Google and Facebook.
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