Magazine traditional ad revenues will be flat or declining through 2018, says PwC; but digital growth will help hold the line

A story in Ad Age summarizing some of the implications for the magazine industry of the just-released PwC annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2014-2018 suggests that while traditional advertising revenues will be flat or declining, digital growth will help to hold the line.

Consumer magazine revenue will be essentially flat this year at $24.6 billion compared with 2013, according to the annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook from PricewaterhouseCoopers, which was released on Tuesday. It will remain at approximately $24.6 billion through 2018, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted.

According to a report in Publishing Executive,  the big takeaway is that as the entertainment and media industry becomes more digitized, advertising growth is outpacing consumer spending. Unsurprisingly, this reveals that consumers are less inclined to pay for digital content. 

Digital consumer magazine revenue is much larger than digital circulation. Digital consumer magazine advertising revenue will rise by an average of 19.2 percent a year from US$3.15 billion in 2013 to US$7.6 billion in 2018; Digital circulation revenue will be just US$1.45 billion in 2018.