B-to-B Mag Ad Pages Down 27 Percent in January

Biggest single month drop in a year marks nearly 30 months of decline.

By Bill Mickey
04/07/2009

B-to-b magazines continued a long string of ad revenue and page declines in January, according to ABM's monthly Business Information Network numbers, which were released today. Ad pages for the month were down 27 percent compared to the same period last year. Revenues were down 21 percent.

This has become a sad but familiar refrain for business publishers which have seen 29 straight months of page declines and 27 months of revenue declines, according to BIN. January's drop, however, took on some added urgency: The decline in pages and revenue is the steepest in at least 12 months.

Full-year 2008 BIN numbers recorded a 10 percent slide in ad pages and a 7 percent drop in revenue. Last month, ABM predicted b-to-b ad revenues could be down as much as much as 22 percent in 2009.

BIN numbers are tracked across 22 categories. In January, all 22 posted negative numbers against January 2008. The top five worst performing ad-page categories included healthcare (-40 percent); electronic engineering (-33 percent); movies, radio, TV & video (-32 percent); government (-31 percent); and architecture, design, lighting (-29 percent).

Revenue figures didn't quite match up with page losses. The computing, software, telecomm category edged architecture, design, lighting out of the top five revenue decliners, which ranged from -36 percent to -27 percent.

The only category to avoid a double-digit decline in pages was aviation, aerospace and military (-8 percent). In terms of revenue, there were more than a few categories that did less badly than the rest. Five of the 22 were below double-digit losses—four were sub-five percent.

A compilation of BIN results over the last nine years can be examined here.