According to a report in the Australian Financial Review the decline in print advertising isn’t due to the internet but to digital TV. The AFR says that Danny Bass, investment director of $2bn media buying agency Group M believes that magazine and newspaper publishers have only themselves to blame as they rush to dump print in favour of online titles. However publishers put much of the blame for falling ad revenues on media buying agencies like Group M, saying digital buying gives them more commissions, and saying that junior agency buyers simply don’t want to understand the power of print.

In recent years magazines have suffered a 20 per cent drop in annual advertising revenue. Bass says that when the economy emerged from the GFC in 2010 the TV companies had launched multiple new free to air channels, while print had stayed still. These free to air TV channels took the lion’s share of the money that came back into advertising. The comments by Bass back up a report last week that showed while newspapers had lost $188m in advertising revenue in the last year their digital counterparts had only increased sales by $14.1m.

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