The Changing Face of Advertising

There has been talk for a number of years of advertising dollars shifting from television to the Internet, and it looks like maybe this is finally starting to happen. Consider the recent advertising revenues from Viacom and Facebook.

Viacom is one of a handful of the big programmers and owns such channels as Comedy Central, MTV, and Nickelodeon (along with Paramount Pictures). This has always made Viacom one of the powerhouses in attracting advertisers along with other large programmers like Disney, Fox, Comcast, Warner Brothers, and a few others. Viacom’s ad revenues in the first quarter of this year were $1.123 B, down slightly from $1.172 B a year ago.

But Facebook’s ad revenues were $5.201 B for the first quarter of this year, up from $3.317 B a year ago. It’s pretty obvious that the big web companies are starting to win the advertising battle. For all of 2015 the total advertising for television was $80.4 B, down slightly from $82.0 B in 2014. But in 2015 the advertising revenues for just Facebook and Google had grown to $84.5 B and is still growing rapidly.

This is not particularly surprising since ratings for television as a whole are plummeting. People are watching traditional television less and are watching more and more video on the web. It seems like the battle between television advertising and web advertising has passed a milestone and that web advertising is now dominant for the first time. I have no idea how fast (or by how much) television advertising will fall, but it looks inevitable that it will.

What does this trend mean to small cable providers? I think it matters a lot because advertising revenue is a major source of revenue for programmers. To the extent that advertising revenues drop for them there is going to be more pressure for them to raise programming rates to cable companies even faster to make up for the revenue difference.

But that could lead into a classic death spiral. Rapidly rising cable TV rates is one of the major factors in driving people towards alternate programming. Many cord cutters and cord shavers cite the cost of traditional cable as a big reason they are looking for alternatives. The more that programmers raise rates, the more eyeballs they are going to lose, and one assumes the more revenue they will lose.

Programmers are also starting to get some pushback from small cable operators. There are a handful of smaller cable systems with less than a million customers in total that have dropped Viacom completely in the last year due to the unreasonable rate increases the company is demanding. I have a number of small cable clients who – when they do the math – realize that they are either losing money on cable or are getting close to the time when they will lose money. Once a company gets to that point then dropping programming is a natural response. It’s better to cut costs and lose customers when you are losing money rather than to keep shoveling money out the door to the programmers.

The programmers are also facing an FCC that is leaning more and more towards giving customers more choices in programming. You can see this in the recent NPRM for settop box reform where they want the cable companies to include ‘channel slots’ for alternate programming like Netflix. The FCC has yet to act on the open docket that is looking at the rights of companies to put content onto the Internet – but it’s clear that the FCC favors consumer choice.

And all of the big cable companies are now implementing or looking to implement skinny bundles. These are smaller packages of just the channels that people want to watch, at a much lower cost to consumers than the big traditional packages. The cable companies want to get off the treadmill of paying huge amounts for programming, and skinny bundles reduce and reset the bar. The cable companies also want to offer an alternative to people to stop them from totally dropping the cable company.

It’s a tough time to be a cable company because margins on the cable product keep tumbling. But it’s starting to also be a rough time for the programmers. Probably the best thing that can happen to the programmers is for Wall Street to lower their stock price to reset the expectations for earnings performance. At that point maybe the whole industry can take a pause and see if they can salvage what is looking like a slowly sinking ship.