Friday, February 01, 2008
A key figure I can't find in today's earnings
It's Gannett's online revenue growth rate at its U.S. newspapers, a figure that's been stuck in the range of 11-12% so far this year. The figure only seems to appear in the quarterly Securities and Exchange Commission filing, which I don't expect for several weeks. I'll be especially interested in seeing whether the rate changes, given that it's already been lagging the industrywide average of around 21%. Digital is the company's future, so if online revenue growth doesn't show up, GCI is in big trouble.
6 comments:
Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Is there ever an on-line revenue figure? At our shop the web gets all of it content from the newsroom (information center), The web employees were all hired from position that were eliminated from the newsroom, there is no web sales department - only the regular sales staff that must sell everything. So why and how could Gannett ever report digital profits?
ReplyDeleteGannett Q4 2007 Earnings Call Transcript
ReplyDeletehttp://seekingalpha.com/article/62716-gannett-q4-2007-earnings-call-transcript
Print advertising revenue has been divided between "classified" and "retail" as long as I remember. Online revenue is the newest bucket and covers the types of ads you don't see in the paper...the enhanced jobs/cars/real estate listings online, banner ads, sponsored links, etc. These are ads that cannot exist in print - so it's "online" revenue.
ReplyDeleteJim:
ReplyDeleteI have a better explanation than the $100,000 advertiser I just submitted. Please use this one.
Corporate sets guidelines on how to allocate revenue streams among papers , magazines, free weeklies, videos, books, etc. But this allocation is more of an 'art' then a science. After the corporate artists are done, the local artists begin to implement those guidelines.
So, say a really big employer seeks to have job ad in CareerBuilder, a paper, and elsewhere or a big retailer wants a mix of papers, shoppers and online. The decisions on how to allocate the revenue will depend as much on internal property politics, corporate politics and the publisher's future employment goals as anything else.
gannett and all companies track online revenue closely! online expenses and profit are harder to track honestly because would you book all of the content expenses as an online expense?
ReplyDeleteanyway 2008 q3 and q4 will probably be good for print advertising, good for gannett as a company and terrific for gannett web site revenue. historically elections and olympics shake advertisers out of malaise, and a new president especially so.
same goes for nyt, tribune, hearst, etc.
i find it interesting that despite gannett's poor q4 earnings, the stock actually went up. i'd theorize that the key analysts and mutual funds might be thinking along the same lines about the last half of 2008. also, as bad as q4 was, they might have thought it would have been worse.
it's interesting if you look at who owns shares in all the big media companies -- basically everybody is at least half-owned by mutual funds.
No, try more like 90 to 95% held by private equity firms, institutional investors, mutual funds, etc.
ReplyDeleteWallstreet eats both the young and the old.