All leading news media in Austria are financed through a combination of sales or licence fee income on the one hand, and advertising and sponsorship on the other. The only exception is ORF’s radio channel, Ö1, dedicated to culture, information, and classical music, which is free of advertising. ORF’s other radio channels, all television channels, and its online media are partly financed by advertising.
Advertising in Austria is a black box to media economists. Media companies do not disclose their advertising income, and there is no database with how much money companies invest in advertising. No information is disclosed by global platforms such as Google and Facebook on their advertising business in Austria. Therefore, statistical evidence that can help to cross-verify the answers of our respondents is lacking.
All editors-in-chief and all journalists categorically rejected any influence of advertisers and other external agents on their editorial content. Their advertising clients are diverse, with no undue influence by any of them. Some respondents recall singular cases of advertisers blackmailing media with the withdrawal of advertising, or even boycotts; however, these incidents were rare and occurred several years ago.
Although no data has been disclosed for commercial advertisers, some evidence regarding advertising by public institutions is available. In 2011, the Austrian parliament passed a law on media transparency, obliging all public institutions and companies governed by the state to disclose quarterly all advertisements, including beneficiaries. This dataset is publicly available online at the website of the telecommunication and broadcasting authority Kommunikationsbehörde Austria (KommAustria) and Rundfunk und Telekom Regulierungs-GmbH (RTR).[i] In 2019, public companies, municipalities, ministries, labour and employers’ associations, public transport, energy supply companies, tourism marketers, universities, and so forth, spent a total of EUR 178 million for media advertising purposes. Table 3 shows the main beneficiary media.
[i] https://www.rtr.at/de/inf/RTROpenData
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Table 3 shows that advertising money is far from being spent equally across news media. There is a strong bias favouring popular media that has high reach among Austrians. Kronenzeitung, Heute, and Österreich are boulevard-style titles with sympathies for populist movements. The public service broadcaster ORF is by far the largest medium in Austria, with its operations being determined by law (ORF Gesetz). Regional newspapers profit much less from public advertising. The regional newspaper in our research sample, Salzburger Nachrichten, received a sixth of the amount that Kronenzeitung did. Public institutions also spent almost EUR 6 million for advertising in Google, and another EUR 2.3 million in Facebook.
For Austrian media, such advertising bookings are essential and economically important. This is exemplified by how the public service broadcaster ORF is obligated to disclose its annual accounts. In 2018, 63.8 per cent of ORF’s income was generated by licence fees and 23 per cent by advertising (the rest included miscellaneous revenues from programme sales and other income) (ORF, 2019). The 23 per cent advertising income was equivalent to EUR 229.6 million. Thus, public advertising represents 8.6 per cent of the entire advertising income. It can safely be assumed that public advertising is relatively more important for the revenue stream of considerably smaller private media.
Seen from a management perspective, in such media houses, public advertising constitutes a main economic pillar and should not be jeopardised. Positive and less critical coverage is conducive to this end. A closer look at the public institutions and the amount spent for beneficiary media might further illustrate this delicate relationship (see Table 4).
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The Ministry of Finance, for example, spent more than EUR 1.3 million for advertisements in Kronenzeitung, but just EUR 69,000 for the quality daily newspaper Der Standard. Still more remarkable is the overall amount spent by the municipality of Vienna for the three boulevard dailies Kronenzeitung, Österreich, and Heute. Together, they received advertising orders of EUR 8.3 million, and Der Standard received another EUR 1.5 million. Overall, advertisers of this scale and order can – and, in all probability do – expect positive coverage in return.
Overall, the implications of this advertising-based media support compromise the beneficiaries’ editorial independence. This might well be relational to the proportion of this support in their entire revenue.
