• Advertising Age, Wednesday, April 8, 2009 9:30 AM

One of the media industry's most stable venues continues to struggle in an extremely tough economy. Three of the nation's five big broadcast networks showed year-over-year declines in 2008 ad revenue, per TNS. Only Fox and NBC were up in 2008 -- thanks to the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

It's relatively rare for broadcast revenues to decline from one year to the next, and the slump is likely to put the big networks in a weakened position in negotiations during this year's upfront. Many advertisers are playing things much more close to the vest, canceling options for ad inventory they had reserved in last year's upfront and instead doling out money on an as-needed basis.

Here's the 2008 rundown: CBS saw a 6.7% decrease to about $6.64 billion in ad revenue. ABC saw a decline of almost 1% to about $6.16 billion. CW's decline was about 13% to about $790 million. In contrast. NBC's ad intake rose about 8.3%. Fox saw an increase of about 5.4%.

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