Lebrument: Mirror for the media industry

The President of the Swiss Press Association and publisher of Südostschweiz comments on the megatrends in the media industry in the Handelszeitung. First the figures: Advertisers and households invested CHF 14.5 billion in the media last year. Of this, 10.3 billion came from households and the remaining 4.2 billion from advertising. The advertising industry's share has fallen continuously since 2000, totaling 15 percent. Swiss families, on the other hand, spent around 300 million more last year than in the previous year (see
"Verband Schweizer Presse publishes study on media expenditure") Such figures have only been collected since 2004. Hanspeter Lebrument points out in the current Handelszeitung that earlier omissions are now taking revenge. There has always been talk of the death of the press, but it has never been analyzed. For a long time, the media industry considered it unnecessary to carry out evaluations and analyses.
But now the figures from the studies by the Swiss Press Association and the Swiss Advertising Statistics Foundation are providing facts. One megatrend that can be derived from all the statistics is a shift in investment, writes Lebrument. Today, people are no longer investing in content - neither on the consumer side nor on the business side. Households and businesses prefer to spend their money on electronic access to media and hardware.
For Lebrument, this does not mean that people no longer value quality - private households have remained loyal to the printed word. If the media industry wants to continue to grow, the association president concludes, it must make changes in its core business, i.e. content. The traditional houses in particular must hurry up, as the suppliers of access and hardware have long since expanded into the content business.