Wall Street

It’s a good thing we never seem to tire of beating the dead pony named print, because the news from the world of magazine advertising (not surprisingly) just keeps getting worse in Q2 2009, according to a story on Media Buyer Planner.

All categories tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau were down by double digits, with automotive, financial, insurance and real estate being hit the hardest, writes Media Life. Automotive fell 47.8%, while financial was down 48.8%. Toiletries and cosmetics performed the best, down 14.1%. . . Total rate-card reported spending for the second quarter was down 22%, while total spending for the first half was down 21.1%.

But how are things going in the land of action sports magazines? Well, as we say nearly every quarter, the only mags from our world that get tracked by the Magazine Publishers of America are those produced by Bonnier Corporation’s Transworld Media. And while it could be argued that it’s not fair to only pick on them, we don’t have the time (nor the magazines) to count up the ad pages in all the action magazines. So here’s how it looked for Transworld Media vs. Q2 2008 based on total ad revenue and advertising pages.

                         $2009      $2008        %change  Pages 09   Pages 08  %change
Transworld Snowboarding  1,069,312   1,897,419   -43.6     52.84      98.33    -46.3
Transworld Skateboarding 7,358,215   9,149,705   -19.6    334.67     433.20    -22.7
Transworld Surf          2,536,506   3,710,912   -31.6    230.67     353.00    -34.7
TransWorld Motocross     3,111,709   4,004,212   -22.3    248.71     336.01    -26.0
RIDE BMX                 1,256,788   1,231,590     2.0    127.33     131.02     -2.8
Quad Off Rad Mag         1,174,915   1,739,876   -32.5    123.19     189.96    -35.1

That’s a drop of 424 pages of advertising in three months and while we don’t really think the revenue amounts are accurate (they’re based on full rate card pricing), it does represent a ($5,226,269) pretty large percentage drop.

Good thing Bonnier’s foodie magazine Saveur is continuing to break records.

[Link: Magazine Publishers of America Photo via Italy from the Inside]

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We have to admit, since the former ASG head’s run on the old Sacklunch message boards we haven’t really kept up with exactly what Don Meek has been up to. We know he’s always in the middle of something big, so this latest bit of news wasn’t all that surprising.

In a bid to leverage its advertising sales infrastructure, the parent company of the Los Angeles Times has reached an agreement to sell national print and online ads for the Dallas Morning News, the flagship media division of A.H. Belo Corp. . . “We are going to take advantage of what we have built as a company to give advertisers access to the top markets in the U.S. You add Dallas to Chicago and Los Angeles and you have three of the top five markets in the country,” said Don Meek, president of Tribune365 National Solutions Group.

Newspaper ad sales? Mr. Meek never has been afraid of a good challenge.

[Link: LA Times]

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