Some NZME shareholders claim the company's current directors haven't performed financially, but the latest Advertising Standards Authority report confirms times are tight for the media across the board. Photo: Screenshot / Composite RNZ
In the ongoing saga battle for control of NZME - the owner of the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB - the activist shareholders who want change - claim the company's current directors haven't performed financially.
This week, the current chair hit back, insisting NZME had done a lot better in recent years than comparable companies here and across the Tasman, where - significantly - the biggest single NZME shareholder is based.
As if to make the point that times are tight for media across the board, the Advertising Standards Authority's latest annual add-up of the turnover from ads showed the mega-trend no traditional media company can buck.
In 2024, the grand total of ads on television and radio, and in newspapers, magazines and online media - as well as on billboards, junk mail and even on screen at the movies - was just under $3.6 billion.
That's about $240 million more revenue than 2023 - good news.
The bad news is high inflation over the year ate into the value of that and local media got a smaller slice of the growing pie.
For example, TV accounted for less than $500m of the annual spend in 2024, while digital online advertising accounted for about two-thirds of the total - almost $2.2b.
The vast bulk of that goes to the big tech companies that dominate our online habits, including Google, Facebook, TikTok and social media platforms - all based offshore.
Digital online advertising now accounts for two-thirds of the total revenue in NZ. Photo: Advertising Standards Authority
"First, there was Dracula, followed by Nosferatu," former New Zealand Herald editor Gavin Ellis wrote.
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer despatched a few, but then we were shown What We Do in the Shadows. However, for the cold-hearted realities of vampirism, nothing beats that on-going series - The Advertising Standards Authority's Advertising Turnover Report.
"Imagine if our health system was largely privatised and the bulk of revenue - not just profit - was being sent offshore with little or no re-investment in this country. How would we react if our hospitals and primary care were being forced to continually downsize and, in some cases, close their doors?" Ellis asked.
There hasn't been any public outcry.
In fact, the latest stats have barely been reported in our news media, even though the tech giants' dominance of the digital ad world is the single biggest factor threatening their financial futures.
"Was it embarrassment at the increasingly poor turnover traditional media are recording?" Ellis wondered. "One might understand that they do not want to 'advertise' the fact that they are losing the war.
"Or do they wish to avoid upsetting the vampires, in the hope that they will send a little of the blood supply in the direction of the news producers?"
Google, Meta and TikTok would care little whether the media here highlighted the growing disparity.
Neither would US President Donald Trump, apparently willing to punish any country prepared to tax the US-owned, profit-shifting tech platforms or compel them to pay our media for their news.
The trend is not just bad news, it's old news now
Infometrics chief economist Brad Olsen. Photo:
TV, radio and newspaper revenue here peaked in 2007. Back then, digital ad revenue was less than the sums pulled in by ads on outdoor billboards, but since, the rise of digital advertising revenue at their expense has been relentless.
Digital's share overtook all other forms of media put together by 2021 and Covid accelerated that trend.
"Radio is in a better position overall and hasn't seen nearly as much of a decline over the last couple of years," said Infometrics chief economist Brad Olsen, who has also been tracking the trends in the annual stats.
"In fact, in 2024, it actually increased by 1.9 percent. Looking at the numbers, though, you can see the hit that's coming through for the traditional media channels,
"Television is down again, over 8 percent. Newspapers down nearly 8 percent.
"Magazines are continuing to see that decline, but digital continues to increase in leaps and bounds," Olsen told Mediawatch.
Digital's rate of increase has flattened over the last three years. Is that a sign of a plateau giving our media industry a horizon for survival, if ad revenue keeps going up a bit, year by year?
"Realistically, it seems tough to imagine a scenario where digital plateaus enough and for traditional media to sort of hold on to the same degree," Olsen said.
"Over the last 10 years, digital has increased by 14 percent per annum on average. Non-digital has fallen by an average of 2.3 percent every year for the last decade.
"Television and newspaper advertising peaked in 2005. Even if the numbers do start to plateau a bit, they are still in a very precarious situation.
"Also, in tougher economic times, you often see the advertising slows back and that's likely to be true even for digital, but when the economy starts to get going again, I wouldn't be surprised to see a larger amount of that additional ad spend start to go into digital platforms, rather than through other media."
The ASA separates out the digital and non-digital components of revenue for each medium.
TV and radio outlets have their own digital presence. They get a separate stream of revenue from it and that is rising year-on-year, albeit from a small base.
Broadcast television made $393m in advertising revenue in 2024 and another $97m from digital TV advertising.
Could that ever be enough to counter the declines in traditional media advertising that are going to the internet?
"I wouldn't have thought so," Olsen said. "The numbers are significant, but you're still seeing enough growth in digital platforms that are not traditional media and that's cannibalising the rest of it.
"Social media and similar is still really continuing to drive a lot of that growth over time. In fact, we saw a 16 percent increase in digital spend over the last year.
"That really is completely blowing out of the water those other gains.
"It was only a couple of years ago that the digital channel became bigger than the entire combination of non-digital, but the two trends are very firmly in opposite directions," said Olsen, who was born in 1997 and has lived his entire adult life in the era of digital advertising's dominance.
"In the meantime, the brutal truth is that we will have to find other ways to sustain our country's journalism, but sustain it we must," Ellis said, in one of few public responses to the latest stats.
He repeated his call for a summit meeting to "rethink our media landscape at a fundamental level".
"If the public is blind to the role that journalism plays in our democracy, perhaps they might be moved by a more parochial argument that brings home the fact that we are suffering a massive bleeding of money to offshore interests."
