NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING accounted for more than a third of overall advertising spend in Ireland last year, according to a new report.
PricewaterhouseCooper’s Entertainment and Media Outlook 2010, which is due to be published in September, shows that spending on newspaper advertising was €343 million in 2009.
The total advertising market in Ireland was worth an estimated €940 million last year, according to the report.
The figures emerged yesterday as PwC published a report on online advertising spending, carried out by the accountancy and consultancy firm on behalf of IAB Ireland, the trade association for the Irish online advertising industry.
The report found that the online advertising market was worth almost €100 million last year – 10 per cent of the overall advertising spend.
Television advertising accounted for €209 million, while radio represented €139 million last year.
At €97.2 million, spending on online advertising has overtaken the spend on outdoor, magazine and cinema advertising.
PwC’s Bartley O’Connor said that this reflected online’s move “to centre stage”.
IAB Ireland’s Suzanne McElligott described the €100 million threshold as a “milestone” for online media, and said the association expects the online market to grow by a further 10 per cent over the coming year.
According to the report, search advertising – predominantly using the pay per click model – accounted for more than 46 per cent of the overall online advertising spend.
Classified and display formats achieved a 27.2 per cent and 26.6 per cent share respectively.
Meanwhile, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) is to increase the amount of advertising permissible on independent Irish commercial television stations from today.
The maximum amount of advertising permitted on stations such as TV3, Setanta Ireland and City Channel will increase from 10 minutes to 12 minutes per hour, and from 15 per cent to 18 per cent per day.
The rules restrict the amount of advertising permitted during children’s programmes to 10 minutes per hour.
National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI) has sharply criticised the decision, which it says was taken “with undue haste” and in the absence of an impact assessment to measure the effect on other media competing in the marketplace.
Chief executive of the BAI Michael O’Keeffe said that while every media provider in Ireland has been challenged by the serious decline in advertising revenues in the last two years, independent Irish commercial television providers face significant additional competitive challenges due to the existence of UK-licensed services which sell opt-out advertising in this jurisdiction.
