Growth in Russia’s advertising market in the first quarter of this year slowed to 4% from 13% for the same quarter of 2018, Kommersant reports.
According to the business newspaper, which cited data from the Association of Communication Agencies of Russia (AKAR), Q1 advertising spending stood at 111 billion rubles ($1.7 billion).
Internet advertising continued to outperform the market at 18% to almost half of all activity but also slowed down from 22% seen in 2018. TV advertising declined by 6% to 42 billion rubles (653 million). A decline in TV ads was registered in 2015, following a sharp ruble depreciation.
“We can say that the advertising market has finally caught up with the actual economic situation,” Sergey Veselov of AKAR commented, adding that given the real income decline of 2% seen in the first quarter, 4% growth of the ad market was “decent”. Veselov also attributed steady growth in the market seen in 2018 to the introduction of new technologies.
Russia’s largest internet majors Yandex and Mail.ru also reported a decline in advertising revenues, to 18% of 27 billion rubles ($420 million) for Yandex and to 19.3% to 7.3 billion rubles ($114 million) for Mail.ru.
In 2018, the overall advertising market grew by 12.4% to 469 billion rubles, with Dentsu Aegis Network expecting growth in 2019 not to exceed 4.5%, according to Kommersant.
