“I'm not going to talk about these black times, but instead about opportunities;” with these words Stig Nordqvist, Executive Director,Emerging Digital Platforms and Business Development for WAN-IFRA kicked off Beyond the Printed Word in Barcelona 2009.
With the sun shining brightly and the Mediterranean sparkling behind the conference venue it might have been easy to forget that these were black times at all but Ramón Salaverría, Director of Periodicals at the University of Navarra's Communication faculty stepped up to remind us what Nordqvist had in mind with a list of the notable closures, including ADN.es and Metro, that have marked the Spanish marketplace in the course of the last couple of years.
Salaverría's presentation was on 'Promising Spanish online operations' and so after a sobering death toll of titles that have suffered he embarked on a whirlwind tour of the developments bringing a bit of light to the market. The launch of Vanguardia's archive service, and the transformation of El Mundo.es into a global site targeting Latin American markets were amongst the highlights, as well as the gradual acceptance of the importance of online services. The fact that the paper edition of El Mundo now sports the '.es' domain tag was symptomatic of that. Rival El Pais and its eventual acceptance of an integrated newsroom for print and online was another example but overall the most striking element of the presentation, as so often, came in the form of a slide showing the cold hard facts of ad spend. Comparing like-for-like figures from Q1 2008 and Q1 2009 he noted a total decrease of 28% in media spend across all media and pointed out that in particular TV and the printed press, the top two media by far suffered 30% plus decreases in advertising spend. The real losers were Sunday supplements (down 42.4%) and magazines (down 37.3%). By contrast online spending had remained relatively stable with only 0.3% losses. More than that in 2008 online came in fifth in the ad spend league tables, behind radio and magazines. By 2009 it was third.
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