Leading German media in our sample are either public service media, with a large part of their income coming from the licence fee, or they are part of bigger and (more or less) well-financed companies, where external influence is quite unlikely because no big advertiser could sustain a boycott for a long time. There are no explicit rules nor structural boundaries against such influence. Some editors-in-chief report rare attempts to impose an advertising boycott on a medium, but the editors resisted this. Advertising from the state or government does not play a role in Germany.
Traditional media still lead in advertising, with television being the most important advertising platform (48% of all advertising expenditure; newspapers have 15.4%; magazines have 10.7%; and online media has 10.9%) (Möbus & Heffler, 2019).
We find great variance with regard to the income composition of different media outlets. Commercial broadcasting, which is nearly completely financed by advertising, earns 92 per cent of all television advertising. In 2018, the second public service media channel, ZDF, was financed 85.4 per cent from the licence fee, 7.9 per cent from advertising and sponsoring, and 6.7 per cent from other incomes, such as programme selling and financial revenues (ZDF, n.d.). The first public service media channel, ARD, has a similar income structure. The financial situation of public service media is quite stable and secure, as it is determined by a complex procedure that inhibits governmental influence. The public broadcasting corporations declare their financial needs for four years, this claim is then proved by the independent commission for settling the financial need of public service media (KEF). KEF then pronounces on the basis of its own calculations a recommendation about the needed amount of the licence fee, and this recommendation must be approved by all 16 parliaments of the Länder [states]. The current round of settling the amount of the licence fee is overshadowed by the fear that parliaments, where the right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has high numbers, will not agree to any augmentation of the licence fee, because the AfD wants to abolish public service media altogether.
Newspaper income has changed significantly. While in 2008 it earned 45.2 per cent of its income from advertising, 46.2 per cent from sales, and 8.6 per cent from newspaper supplements (Marcinkowski & Donk, 2011), this ratio has changed in 2018 to 31.1 per cent advertising, 64.4 per cent sales, and 4.4 per cent newspaper supplements (Keller & Eggert, 2019). Details of advertisers for the whole print industry show a fairly diverse picture, such that dependence on only a few or even government advertisers seems to not be a problem for newspapers. It is even acceptable for some media to abstain completely from some advertising revenues if it clashes with reporting, for example, “In the health sector we have practically no advertising from pharmaceutical companies because we are very critical of medical issues”.
