• by July 14, 2004

The New York Times Co. announced June advertising revenues today.

Overall ad revenues for the company's business units rose just 2.3 percent.

The Times' Digital unit, which includes NYTimes.com and Boston.com, posted the most growth in June with a 36.3 percent increase in ad revenue. No surprise there.

The New York Times Newspaper Group saw a 0.1 percent increase in June versus June 2003. National ad revenues decreased, hurt by weakness in the transportation and tech products sectors. Interestingly, ad revenues in the Times' Broadcast Group jumped 6.0 percent, helped by gains in the political, restaurant and financial ad sectors.

The Times' June numbers reflect what we have observed since the start of '04--that the Digital unit appears to be the growth engine of the company, although the Broadcast group saw a modest 6 percent bump in June.

It's good to see online growing. Part of that growth is being fueled by broadband video and rich media advertising.

An interesting point came up yesterday during one of the panels at the Ad:Tech-Chicago show, and that is, when will Nielsen or another provider of online audience measurement data come up with a single source or tool for measuring all video.

Charlie Buchwalter, VP-Client Analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings, acknowledged that the single source idea is a good one, "We have so much work to do to track and integrate and measure online media," but conceded that Nielsen's major priority at the moment is the creation and refinement of its mega-panel, which will include workplace Internet usage. Work on the mega-panel also comes prior to any move to combine websites' log data with Nielsen's panel data; Buchwalter was asked about when this would occur.

Acknowledging that he couldn't speak for Nielsen Media Research, Buchwalter did say that "Within Nielsen [as a whole] we are looking at the entire [media measurement] picture."