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Comment by Deukhoofd | Hacker News Reader

I'd really need to see actual numbers for this, especially as this is kind of contrary to the yearly report Ster released two weeks ago. In this they stated that while the first couple months of 2020 were more or less in line with their budget, they dropped to below budget after corona. I have some trouble believing they made a budget based on a 60% increase from the preceding year.

https://www.ster.nl/media/2ssmp5p5/ster-jaarverslag_2019.pdf

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Also, I don't know all of the details here but selling hyper targeted ads requires to pay for a direct sales team. This adds to the cost and lowers the profitability. There's a reason FB/Google ads are so lucrative.

Also noteworthy is that the Dutch government has decided to seriously limit the amount of ads on NPO TV channels and websites. No ads before 8 PM on TV, no ads at all on the websites.

I don't think they implemented the `no ads before 8PM on tv` yet. I'm actually surprised about how open they are about advertising costs per second for each block on the npo1 channel [1].

[1] https://www.ster.nl/media/rrifn3t0/npo-1-juni-2020-gewijzigd...

I don't speak dutch, but does this mean that cost on average 1000 euros for a 30 second ad? Or is it per minute? (it as 30" on top not sure if it is minimum block you need or per 30 seconds)

I would expect a lot more to be honest! (I know it changes and I bet those values around some specific events to be bigger, but still)

The price list is indeed for a 30-second television ad. However, it seems like you can't just buy one slot, you need to spend >€30k before they start to do business with you.

[in Dutch] https://www.ster.nl/hoe-werkt-het/tv-reclame-bij-ster/

Cool! Thank you for the info!

Yes, my wording was a bit sloppy, apologies! Should be: the government has made plans to ...

Interesting document! There's a lot of information in here that I never really realized.

Looks like on any given day, you have an opportunity to be exposed to about 3 hours worth of commercials.

Further, total revenue from ads tops around 65,000 euros on a week day (on Tuesdays, it seems), much less on weekend days as more long-form programs are scheduled on those days. (The NPO does not interrupt shows for "ad-breaks"). On the other hand, there are some sketchy schedules, like the 6 PM news is a 15 minute thing sandwiched between two 8-minute ad blocks, and the "sports news" is a 5 minute update sandwiched between two 5-minute ad blocks.

These are the stats for the NPO 1 channel, which is the flagship channel for the NPO and bound to bring in the most ad revenue. If all days were to bring in this much revenue, it would mean a revenue of ~24 million euros a year, meaning a little bit over 8 NPO 1's would be necessary to bring in the revenue the STER claims to bring each year (which is 200 million euros).

I must be missing something..

Update: Ah, the stated price is for 30 seconds of ad time, rather than the price for the full block.

Update2: Recalculating, the daily top comes down to around 675,000 euros, meaning around 246 million euros a year.

According to the report, online advertising revenue accounts for 5.351.000 EUR while TV did so for 144.365.000 EUR (2019). Thus the impact of online ad revenue rise seems relatively small.

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