Turning Point: Media Choices

Author: Yu Guoming
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: 2005 was not an easy year for China's media industry. Too much pressure and uncertainty piled onto the young industry, with overlapping problems and confusion squeezing it, making it experience life's confusion for the first time. The reasons for the confusion and are largely the same. In most cases, it is not the lack of space in reality that restricts us, but rather our own entrapment in the operational model that has proven effective time and again, as well as the outdated ways of thinking in our minds. Therefore, the wisdom and freedom to break through confusion and come from a deep understanding of our current confusion and. Keywords: Encounter a turning point If people's understanding of the turning point two years ago was still a prophecy of the pioneers, then in 2005, the turning point had become a sharp pain for China's traditional media, especially print media. Two sets of data are highly representative. One is the 2005 mid-year report of Beijing Youth Media, which is hailed as the first overseas-listed stock of China's newspaper industry. It showed that the company's operating revenue declined by 28% in the first half of the year, with advertising revenue decreasing by 36.9% year-on-year. The net profit was 170,000 yuan, a sharp drop of 99.76% compared to the same period in 2004. The other is the Guangzhou Daily, which had the highest advertising revenue per copy in the country for 11 consecutive years. From January to July 2005, its advertising revenue saw a negative growth of 6.25%. The simultaneous decline of the two leading media in the newspaper industry is not a coincidence. Although Beijing Youth Media attributes the decline in its annual report data to macro-control, which led to a sharp drop in real estate advertising—the main source of its revenue—this affected the performance in the first half of the year. In fact, the advertising structure of both newspapers indeed has a high proportion of real estate ads. According to monitoring results from relevant institutions, in 2003, real estate advertising revenue accounted for 39.8% of the total advertising revenue of the Guangzhou Daily (44.2% in 2002), and the proportion was even higher for the Beijing Youth Daily, reaching 63.2% of its total advertising revenue. However, people still have reasons to ask the question: Why are two strong media newspapers so unprepared to respond to market changes? In fact, if we go back to the statistics of traditional Chinese media advertising revenue in 2004, we will find that the crisis in advertising operations is not just a few newspapers. In 2004, while the overall growth in national advertising revenue was 16%, the average growth of the four major traditional media was only 5%. This is the first time since 1981 that the growth rate of traditional Chinese media advertising has dropped into single digits, and newspapers have even seen unprecedented negative growth. If we step back from a specific media and look at the development trend of China's traditional media from a higher perspective, examining the reasons for its slowdown and entry into the turning point area, we will find that the crisis and opportunities faced by China's media industry have been brewing for a long time. Extracting them in time is like fine wine, but missing the opportunity is like poison. Keywords: Rule double failure Market failure in economics refers to the market-based resource allocation mechanism failing to solve market defects, severely hindering productivity development, and leading to...