• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, June 29, 2010

April may not have been the cruelest month, but it wasn't particularly good for business-to-business publications, according to the latest data from American Business Media's Business Information Network. It has total ad pages falling 4.7% from 51,010 in April 2009 to 48,609 in April 2010, while total revenues fell 4% to $606 million.

These modest drops suggest the rate of decline is moderating somewhat, but clearly B2B titles aren't experiencing any uptick.

Among the B2B ad categories experiencing the biggest drops were transportation and logistics; pages fell 35% in April; computing, software and telecom, down 25%; building, engineering, and construction, down 22%; movies, radio, TV and video, down 19%; and travel, business conventions, and meetings, down 17%.

As noted, the overall decline was noticeably smaller than in previous months. A disastrous 2009 saw ad pages tumble 28% compared to 2008, B2B ad pages dropped another 15.3% in January, 9.4% in February, and 5.7% in March -- holding out hope that the medium is finally bottoming out.

For the year-to-date through April, total ad pages declined 8.2% from 204,741 to 187,925, while total ad revenues slipped 5.9% from $2.45 billion to $2.3 billion.

The performance of B2B publications is roughly parallel to consumer magazines, where ad pages plunged 25.6% from 2008-2009, followed by a smaller decline of 9% in the first quarter of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.