Mass media market shows small growth in 2017

The value of the mass media market was about EUR 3.8 billion in 2017. Compared to the year before, the value of the market grew by 1.4 per cent or EUR 53 million, according to Statistics Finland.

Publishing (incl. newspapers, free-distribution papers, periodicals and books) is still clearly the biggest sector by its volume in the Finnish media market.

However, the sales of daily newspapers and periodicals continued their nearly decade-long fall in 2017, which pressed down the entire publishing.

In turn, book sales have grown in the past few years, although due to renewals in statistics compilation the latest data cannot be fully compared with the previous years' figures. Statistics Finland's calculation is based on the data of the Booksellers Association of Finland and the Finnish Book Publishers Association.

In 2017, television was the biggest individual media activity with its volume of good EUR 1.1 billion. The television industry here includes the entire activity of the Finnish Broadcasting Company, television advertising in commercial television and subscription fees to television services, which are cable TV basic fees and pay TV fees (incl. video on-demand services such as Netflix).

In 2017, the television industry grew boosted by pay TV by good two per cent from the previous year. According to the data collected by Finnpanel, an ever growing share of households follows video on-demand services. Various pay TV fees form an increasingly bigger part of households’ media consumption expenditure. This appears from Statistics Finland's Household Budget Survey published this year. In contrast, the amount and share of television advertising in television revenues continued declining.

Internet advertising grew by over 14 per cent from the previous year and was around EUR 370 million in 2017.

The year 2017 was also favourable for the audio media: audio recordings are estimated to have grown by good eight per cent and commercial radio by good four per cent from the previous year. The audio market is now boosted by digital sales, which according to IFPI Finland’s data, already covered 83 per cent of Finnish recording sales in 2017. Radio advertising has, in turn, grown fairly steadily for several years.

The year 2017 also brought clear growth to cinemas compared to the previous year. Cinema ticket sales and cinema advertising grew in total by good nine per cent. According to the Finnish Film Foundation’s data, 8.8 million visits were made to cinemas in Finland last year. Domestic films gathered 2.4 million viewers (27 per cent of all cinema visits); by far the most the film Unknown Soldier that was re-filmed in 2017.

According to the European Audiovisual Observatory, the video recording market contracted by around 25 per cent from the previous year. The data include selling of DVD and Blu-ray discs and renting of Blu-ray films but renting data of DVD films are missing from the calculation this time.

Despite the small growth recorded now, the size of the mass media market has decreased further relative to the entire national economy. In 2017, the share of mass media in GDP was 1.7 per cent, while it was 2.1 per cent ten years earlier. From 2007, the mass media market has contracted by 3.6 per cent and the contraction has been quite drastic particularly in videos, audio recordings and publishing.