The French-speaking radio market in Montreal has lost a quarter of its revenue in five years. Many advertisers jumped ship with the pandemic, and have not since gotten back into the habit of paying for advertising space on the air, at least not as often as before. This new reality is also being felt in the rest of Quebec, but to a lesser extent.
The trend is clear, based on the most recent figures from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Commercial stations in Montreal’s French-language market suffered a 21% drop in revenue in the first year of the pandemic, and the situation has never returned to normal since.
Even though losses continued to widen. During the 2022-2023 financial year, the first to cover an entirely post-pandemic period, the French-language radio station in the metropolis still experienced a slight drop in revenue (-0.5%) compared to the previous year.
“Since the pandemic, the financial context has meant that advertisers are looking for a return on their investment in the short term. This is what digital media, like Facebook, allow us to do, encouraging us to buy quickly. Advertising in traditional media, like TV or radio, is more of an investment that pays off in the long term. It’s a way for advertisers to build their notoriety and reputation with the public,” explains Anne-Sophie Collins, media director at the Dialekta agency.
M’s workme Collins’s role is essentially to advise advertisers on their advertising strategy. She is quite optimistic about the future of traditional media, and is hopeful that advertisers who have abandoned them will return to them in the coming years.
But for now, we have to admit that the context is difficult, and this is true everywhere in Canada. English-language radio stations in the country have lost 26% of their revenues in five years. French-language radio is doing better, but barely. The Montreal French-language market is the one suffering the most from the exodus of advertisers. For the past two years, its revenues have remained below $80 million, a drop of nearly 24% compared to the year before the pandemic. The losses amount to 20% for the Ottawa-Gatineau French-language market, 18% in the Quebec City region and 14% elsewhere in the province.
If regional markets are a little less affected than Montreal, it is because their revenues come more from the sale of local advertising. For the past two years, local advertisers have been tending to return to commercial radio, even if we are still far from pre-pandemic levels. Conversely, large national advertisers are disinvesting from the airwaves. The sale of local advertising increased by a little less than 3% in the various French-speaking markets in the country in the last year, while revenues from large national advertising campaigns decreased by 9% during the same period.
“Digital media allows national advertisers to have greater reach at a lower cost. It’s not necessarily more advantageous in the end, but the entry costs to get an advertising message across are lower than for traditional media,” says Anne-Sophie Collins to explain the desertion of large national advertisers.
What future for radio?
Bell Media, owner of the Rouge and Énergie networks, declined to comment on the latest CRTC figures Monday. Cogeco Media, which owns 98.5 FM in Montreal and FM93 in Quebec City, did not respond to our questions.
It’s no secret that the two biggest names in Quebec’s radio industry are currently struggling. Last February, Bell announced that it was launching the process of selling off 45 of its 103 antennas across the country, including 7 in Quebec. The Arsenal group plans to acquire these stations, located in Montérégie, Centre-du-Québec and Bas-Saint-Laurent. As for Cogeco, its executives openly discussed possible closures before the CRTC last November, arguing for public assistance for the radio sector.
For Sébastien Charlton, a researcher at the Centre d’études sur les médias at Université Laval, the radio industry could be the scene of major transactions in the coming years or months. “The decline in profits makes radio less attractive to the big players who are listed on the stock exchange. It’s becoming difficult for them to justify to their shareholders that their profit margins are still falling. It wouldn’t be surprising if radio stations were sold to smaller private players. A bit like what we saw recently with Bell, which sold seven stations to Arsenal,” he points out.