Fairfax Media’s 2010 annual meeting will be held in Sydney later this week and I can guarantee they won’t be highlighting a key trend that keeps emerging from each monthly report from the ANZ on job ads.
That trend is the increasing irrelevance of newspapers as an advertising medium against the internet, which continues to tighten its grip on the way employers large and small advertise vacancies and recruit staff.
Fairfax’s broadsheets like The Sydney Morning Herald and The Melbourne Age used to have a lock on job ads, along with real estate, cars and other classified ads.
That dominance has long gone (and even The Australian Financial Review, like its News Ltd counterpart, The Australian, has been restricted to the top end of the jobs market, both public and private sectors.
Newspapers in other states, such as The Courier Mail in Brisbane, The Advertiser in Adelaide (both now tabloids and owned by News Ltd) and the Kerry Stokes-controlled West Australian in Perth had a similar dominance of classified, especially employment for decades until the internet arrived and started grabbing an increasing share.
News and Fairfax, plus APN, the regional publishing giant, have tried to stop the flow of ads away from their businesses by starting their own websites, but that hasn’t worked. The outflow continues.
Now that dominance is complete, and yet the loss of market share for newspapers continues, even as the jobs market has seen some of the strongest growth on record this year.
Take the October job ads report from the ANZ released yesterday.
The headline was that Australian job advertisements in newspapers and on the internet rose to the highest level in nearly two years in October.
The latest ANZ job ads report showed total job advertisements rose a seasonally adjusted 0.6% in October from September when they rose a revised 1.1% (0.7% rise originally reported).
That was the sixth straight monthly increase and left ads up 34.6% on October last year. Total job ads averaged 179,040 per week.
The survey showed ads in major newspapers fell 0.3% in October, but were up 7.1% for the year. Job ads on the internet increased by 0.6% in October, to be 36.5% more than a year ago.
But the report pointed out that October saw the number of job advertisements in major metropolitan newspapers fall for a fifth month in the last seven.
The ANZ said this fall "in part appears to reflect greater penetration of internet advertising in South Australia and Queensland", which would be bad news for the News Ltd papers in those states, especially The Courier Mail and The Advertiser.
The fall in newspaper job ads in October was led by the Northern Territory (-7.6% Month on Month), Queensland (-5.4% MoM) and New South Wales (-1.3% MoM). Smaller gains in Victoria (+1.5% MoM), South Australia (+0.8% MoM), Western Australia (0.7% MoM), Tasmania (+3.7%) and the ACT (+2.2% MoM) partly offset the falls in the other states.
"In annual growth terms, newspaper job advertisements are rising in New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Territories but are falling in Queensland and South Australia. The strength in annual job ads growth is most pronounced in Western Australia (+50.9% Year on Year) and the Northern Territory (+12.3% YoY)."
The ANZ said, "The number of internet job advertisements rose by 0.6% in September. This is a slowing from the 1.3% rise experienced in September and is the softest result since April 2010. Internet job advertisements are however still 36.5% higher than they were a year ago."
This means that the growth in job ads has, for most of 2010, been driven by the growth in internet ads.
The ANZ’s figures show the number of monthly job ads on the net and in newspapers has risen from 133,622 in January of this year to October’s 179,040: that’s an extra 45,378 position; of that extra the internet took 98.5% and newspapers the rest.
Or put it another way, the number of job ads in newspapers in the ANZ survey rose by just 645 from January to October, while the number of net ads jumped by more than 44,700.
The ANZ’s survey has seen a slowing in overall ad growth in recent months, with the net ads the slowest this year in October.
For that reason the bank’s economics team sees Thursday’s jobs report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reporting a 15,000 rise in the number of jobs, with the unemployment rate remaining steady at 5.1%. The AMP sees the rate falling to 5%.
And if today’s mid year budget review sees big budget cuts, as suspected, you can bet that one of the ways costs will be cut will be by cutting back on recruitment into the federal public service, which will hit newspapers like the AFR and The Australian even more if it lasts for long and is extensive.
