• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, February 18, 2010

Online contributed a relatively small part of total magazine advertising revenues in 2009, despite an economic downturn that decimated print ad revenues.

Thus, 2009 saw little change from previous years, with the print-dominated magazine publishing business -- like their cousins in the newspaper industry -- for the most part failing to build substantial online ad revenues despite big increases in online traffic.

Caveat: any assessment of the magazine industry is partly conjecture, because two of the largest magazine publishers -- Conde Nast and Hearst -- are privately held, and don't make revenue figures available to the public. However, several publicly owned magazine publishers -- Time Inc., Meredith Corp., and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia -- release figures that can be used as proxies for the industry in general.

At Time Inc., online advertising revenues came to about $160 million in the first nine months of 2009, making up 12% of the publisher's total advertising revenues in that period. In dollar terms, the 2009 figure represented an 11% decrease from the same period of 2008, when online advertising revenues totaled $180 million; however, online ad revenue's proportion of total ad revenues still increased from 10% to 12% because of the 22% decrease in overall advertising revenues.

In proportional terms, the 2009 figure is double the 6% share of online advertising in the first nine months of 2007, when digital contributed $115 million to Time Inc.'s total ad revenues.

Meredith Corp. has also seen online revenues stagnate over the last couple of years, but like Time Inc., online advertising's share of total advertising has increased in proportional terms as a result of the drop in print ad revenues. In the second half of 2009, Meredith's total online revenues (across both its print and digital properties) came to about $49 million, or 7.3% of total revenues of $669 million. That's up from $47.2 million in the second half of 2008, when online represented 6.5% of a total $725 million.

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia said total Internet ad revenues came to $9.5 million in the first nine months of 2009, or about 12.4% of total advertising revenues of $76.7 million in this period. That compares to Internet ad revenues of $9.7 million, or about 9.6% of total advertising revenues of $101 million in the first nine months of 2008.