STATS: Online Ad Spend Share by Industry - February 2008

Ed: top-5 buyers of online branding ads - finance, retail, web, mobile, auto
 consumer (verticals - sports, home, shopping), travel, entertainment, public service, software, electronics, health, B2B
 local (auto dealer, realtor, financial, grocery, restaurants, health, events)

Note: Nielsen Online’s AdRelevance service uses a proprietary methodology for estimating online advertising expenditures and only takes into account image-based technologies and advertising sold per CPM. Above data does not reflect house advertising activity, strategic partnerships between publishers and advertisers, or text units, compound image/text ads, paid search, sponsorships, email, units contained within applications (e.g., messengers and pre-rolls) or performance based advertising.

Newspaper Site Visits Soar in Q1 - Visitors Affluent, Multimedia-Savvy, Political

Newspaper websites attracted a record 66.4 million unique visitors per month (40.7% of internet users), on average, in the first quarter of 2008 - or 2.3% more than in 1Q07, according to a Nielsen Online custom analysis for the Newspaper Association of America.

Newspaper site visitors generated an average of 3.1 billion page views per month for the quarter, compared with slightly less than three billion during the first quarter last year.

The first quarter unique visitor and page view figures are the highest for any quarter since NAA began tracking those numbers in 2004, and the largest increase since the third quarter of 2006.

Separately, Nielsen Online @Plan data (spring ‘08) found that newspaper website visitors are more politically engaged, more affluent and more multi-media savvy than the online audience as whole:

• More politically engaged than the Internet population as a whole:
  • Newspaper site users are more than twice as likely to provide frequent advice on politics and current events to others.
  • More than three times as many newspaper readers went online for politics or campaign information “yesterday.”
  • Newspaper site visitors are more than three times as likely to have watched online video concerning politics or public affairs ” last month.”
• A more desirable demographics than the overall internet audience:
  • 31% more likely to hold professional or managerial positions
  • 46% more likely to have a post-graduate degree
  • 27% more likely to earn $100,000 or more annually
• More multimedia-oriented than the internet population as a whole:
  • Newspaper site visitors are 76% more likely to have downloaded video or audio “yesterday.”
  • Newspaper site users are twice as likely to have searched the internet on their cell phones or other wireless device “yesterday.”
  • Newspaper site visitors are twice as likely to use iTunes in the past month, 71% more likely to provide computer advice frequently and nearly twice as likely to have watched streaming video “yesterday.”
• Big spenders, compared with the overall internet audience:
  • Newspaper website visitors are 59% more likely to have shopped online for a new automobile “in the past 6 months.”
  • Those who visit newspaper sites are twice as likely to have taken 3-4 round-trip flights in “the last month.”
  • Newspaper site visitors are twice as likely to have done investment shopping online “in the past 30 days.”

(NAA has a podcast with more information on the research and the online numbers.)

About the data: The Nielsen Online newspaper total represents a de-duplicated visitor total taken from its combined home and work panel of internet users (someone who might read a national newspaper plus the local newspaper online counted is only once). The target sample (2 years or older) has access from a non-shared PC at work and/or access from home. The Nielsen Online monthly newspaper total represents the de-duplicated reach of a custom list of hundreds of sites collectively.

Magazines Leaking Ad Pages, Dollars

from Silicon Alley Insider by Peter Kafka

Some not unexpected news out of the magazine business: It's shrinking. Mediapost:

Magazines felt the chill of a slowing economy in the first quarter of 2008, with ad pages falling 6.3% compared to the same period in 2007, according to figures released by the Publishers Information Bureau and TNS Media Intelligence. Including newspaper magazines, total ad pages fell from 54,126 in 2007 to 50,696 this year...

The decline in ad pages was led by the top six consumer magazine publishers, with Conde Nast down 2.6%, Time Inc. 5.3%, Hearst 3.2%, Bonnier 11.5%, Hachette Filipacchi 7% and Meredith 12.2%.

Mediapost notes that the surveys' revenue estimates remained just about flat for the quarter, which sounds good -- until you realize that the estimates are basically meaningless in this case, since they're based on the magazines' rate cards: The prices they'd like to charge. Much in the same way that homeowners across the country would like to not take a beating when they sell their house.

Not addressed here: How much of the mag biz decline can be attributed to Wal-Mart's (WMT) decision to clean 1,000 titles of its shelves earlier this year.