Profits at SMG have been heavily impacted by the slowdown in the advertising market and an increase in the group’s ITV licence fees, the interim results released this morning have shown. Pre-tax profit was down by 33.7% to £19.9 million for the six months to 30 June, whilst operating profit fell by 12% £32 million.… Continue reading SMG Profits Stung By Ad Slowdown

US online adspend fell by 10% year on year in the first half of 2001, according to figures released today by CMRi, the internet division of advertising and marketing communications group, CMR. CMRi estimates that US internet adspend for H1 2001 totalled $1.5 billion. Yahoo continued to drive overall website revenues with a total of… Continue reading Internet Hit By Ad Downturn As Spend Drops 10% In First Half

BSkyB is in discussions with Channel 5 that may lead to the satellite group taking a stake in the terrestrial station, the Sunday Business reported yesterday without naming its sources. C5 is owned 65% by pan-European broadcaster RTL and 35% by United Business Media (UBM). However, UBM has recently disposed of the rest of its… Continue reading BSkyB Interested In C5 Stake According To Reports

The well-documented fall-out in the internet market has reached Chrysalis as the company today announced that it will be ending all new media investments bar its sports network Rivals.net. The write down to Chrysalis’ accounts for the year will total £9.6 million and this does not include trading losses incurred by the New Media division… Continue reading New Media Write-Offs Cost Chrysalis

The French Government may relax its regulations on television advertising, possibly allowing press and retailers to advertise on TV by 2003, according to French press reports and ABN Amro. The broker says that the rationale behind the move would be to increase the attractiveness of the digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform to free to air… Continue reading France May Relax TV Advertising Rules

Chief executive of US media group, Liberty Media, John Malone, has said in an interview with Die Welt that the company will start operating cable television services in Germany in about one year’s time. The announcement follows Liberty Media’s recent acquisition of six cable franchises from Deutsche Telekom for around €5.5 billion. Further investment costs… Continue reading Liberty Media To Launch German Cable TV Services

Market research group Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) has this morning reported a strong set of interim financial results, with organic sales rising by 6.7% and pre-tax profit up by 9.1% to £17.1 million. The company said that the strong figures illustrate the ‘relative resilience’ of the market information industry worldwide, which is growing despite the… Continue reading Taylor Nelson Sees Strong Results, Driven By Core Market Research Business

According to the recent report Online Teen Spending, 2001, Datamonitor forecasts that by 2005 teenagers will spend up to $10.6 billion online, a rise from $483 2000. The survey looked at teenage spending online in seven EU countries and the US and found that online penetration amongst teenagers was often higher than amongst the population… Continue reading Teenagers Will Spend $10.6 Billion Online In 2005, Says Datamonitor

New research reveals that 40% of web surfers will visit a news or information site more often if its pages load faster and advises that companies should worry less about spending lots of money on the latest web design technology, as this will not increase user levels. According to the Jupiter Research Web Enterprise report,… Continue reading Technology For Technology’s Sake Doesn’t Necessarily Build Website Use, Says Jupiter

New media advertising is set to boom over the next few years, despite its rocky fortunes in the last 18 months. Market researchers Allegra Strategies forecast that while the difficult market will mean a downturn this year, the average rate of growth for the next few years for new media ad revenues will be 51.8%… Continue reading New Media Ad Revenue To Rise