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Rising newsprints costs have forced Times of India and ABP, two of the media giants, to hike ad rates by over 15% so far, with another hike on the cards.
Supriya Sinha who looks after ABP's Anandabazar Patrika and recently launched tabloid E-bela said ad rates have already gone up by over 15%.
“Given the state of economy, ad rates had to be hiked. So far, it is to the tune of 10-15% but there can be another round of hike in rates,” he said by adding that this would lead to a dip in the number of ads coming to the news daily. It may be noted that ABP had to hike the cover prices of its Bengali dailies recently by almost 25%. Newsprint accounts for 40per cent of the cost of a newspaper and the industry imports over a million tonne of news print every year. Owing to overall slowdown in the Indian economy, ABP Pvt Ltd, had to sell off its business magazine Businesworld.
Bennett Coleman and Company (BCCL), which runs The Times of India, has also hiked ad rates on similar scale to ABP. While Times of India is one of the largest selling news dailies in the country ABP has undisputed dominance in the eastern part of the country with its English daily The Telegraph and Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika.
On the other hand, companies failing to meet annual targets, are squeezing their advertising budget. This is resulting into a substantial dip in number of ads for print media companies, despite the festive season being underway, which has added to the media companies' woes.
Some companies are also opting for digital advertisements. A Samsung India spokesperson said,”While we keep investing in advertising in all mediums, we are dong a lot more in digital platforms these days,”
“Companies are failing to meet estimated targets. So certainly this would result into a contraction into over all spends on advertising,” Kamal Nandi, VP (sales & marketing), Godrej Appliances.
