Despite double-digit growth for its online ad sales, the mainline newspaper business is dragging down ad revenues at the New York Times Company. May advertising revenues plunged 8.5%, with its regional newspaper group suffering even more than its flagship NY Times and the New England Media Group anchored by the Boston Globe.
The company no longer has its former television group, which had 12.7 million in revenues in May 2006. But the May 2007 figure is adjusted for that and ad revenues from continuing operations were down 8.5% to 157.3 million. The company doesn't break out what portion of that came from its lone radio station, WQXR-FM NYC. It does, however, proudly break out a little bit of information about the Internet sites associated with its media properties. Ad revenues there were up 21.4% for the month, which means that newspaper results were even a little bit worse than the overall ad numbers, where retail fell 14.9%, classified dropped 12.9% and national was down 5.6%.
About.com, which is reported separately, saw ad revenues rise 32.6% to 7.4 million. Newspaper circulation revenues were up 0.1% to 67.7 million. That brought the overall revenue decline for the NYT Co. for May to 5.8% for total revenues of 243.5 million.
