The largest Russian media holding intends to reduce its costs significantly.
The revenues of the “CTC Media” increased by 20% in the first quarter of 2015, against the same figures in 2014. These data were provided to the edition “Vedomosti” by Juliana Slaschova, CEO at the Media Holding.
The company’s earnings from advertising increased by 22%, while the TV channel CTC’s ones by 25%. As the “CTC Media” believes, the figures of the media holding itself were significantly higher than the ones of the Russian TV advertising market as a whole, which increased by 15-18%, according to the company’s estimates. According to Mrs. Slaschova, the advertising industry will no longer develop at similar rate, increasing just by 2.5% yearly.
The “CTC Media”’s profit increased not only due to the company’s activity in the TV advertising segment. The audience share of the three company’s TV channels increased as well:
- CTC: audience in the age group 10-45 years increased from 8.3% to 9.2%;
- “Domashniy” (Home): female audience in the age group 25-59 years increased from 3.4 to 4%;
- CTC Love: audience in the age group 11-34 years increased from 0.8 to 1.3%.
The only one that showed lower results was the channel “Che”, as its audience decreased from 1.9 to 1.6%.
This increase in CTC’s viewership has been observed first over recent years. As remarked by Lika Blank, the General Producer at the Media Holding, the TV channel wishes to re-attract families to TV screens, so that it will be back to sitcoms, not experimenting with dramatic TV series. Instead of them the evening airtime will present foreign movies. Mrs. Slaschova also adds that the TV channel’s content costs did not increase, as the company re-signed contracts with the Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures on favorable terms, as well as it reduced expenses nearly by 35-40%. As emphasized by the CEO, evening movie screenings provide CTC with a share of 10%, and their rerunning makes 8%. Such a broadcasting grid scheduling policy will be followed by the TV channel approximately until the end of the year.
However, despite the increase in revenues over the first quarter, the last year’s revenues of the “CTC Media” in rubles dropped by 24%, which is far less than the total market figures. At the same time, such a trend was observed not only concerning the media holding, but also all broadcasters: According to the Russian Association of Communication Agencies, the earnings from advertising of all channels dropped by 14%.
