Australia’s media groups are quick to make claims about the importance of free speech, disclosure and transparency and demand it from government, unions, business and others, but not themselves. Free TV Australia has outsourced the biannual production of TV ad revenue figures to the recently formed lobby group and think tank ThinkTV. Despite claims to have expanded data that “captures all of the advertising revenue spent by advertisers and their agencies on commercial TV”, the new system actually cuts the amount of information disclosed.

For all the claims of comprehensiveness, the report lacks transparency and is a way of confusing rather than explaining the revenue problem the commercial TV industry finds itself in. Compared to the report it replaces (the biannual report it replaces from Free TV Australia broke down the ad data for Seven, Nine and Ten into metro and regional markets, and within those groups, into individual markets, such as the five metro capitals, and into the various regional markets), it is considerably lighter on information.

Yesterday’s release contains several bits of data in the following sentence: “Under the new metric, the Total TV market declined 2.72% to $2.23 billion for the six months to December 31, 2016. AVOD (video on demand) revenue, while still a small part of overall revenue, grew by 48% to $38.1 million.” There is no attempt to break it down into various markets and no shares for the various networks.

What is clear is that the apparent substantial increase in revenue from the same six months at the end of 2015 (when the ad revenues for Ten, Nine and Seven were disclosed and totaled $1.972 billion), is due to the inclusion of the Multi Channel Network (an initiative of Foxtel, Fox Sports and Channel Ten — controlled by News Corp). What is also clear that from the financial reports from Foxtel, News Corp, Seven West Media and last week’s loss warning from Ten, the industry’s viability has worsened in the past six to nine months.

The lack of any breakdown in the ThinkTV data echoes a similar release last October from the News Corp-dominated Newsmediaworks about the amount of advertising in print. The figure given was $2.28 billion for the year to September, 2016 – no breakdown between the differing forms of advertising (except the claim that print accounted for 80% of the figure and digital 20%). No breakdown between newspapers, magazines, newspaper inserted magazines, as there was in the first release in May. — Glenn Dyer