Something Ugly To Ponder For Those Soon To Graduate Into The Media World

AdAge charts the top 100 media companies in the country by revenue and finds that 2007 growth was the slowest it’s been in six years. As Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider points out, if it’s this slow in 2007, imagine how horrific it will be for 2008 and 2009?

AdAge found that overall media growth rose 4.7%, with Digital contributing the greatest at 10.7% and cable networks kicking in 10.6%. Newspapers dropped the most, losing 6.8% in revenue. All in all, media companies pulled in $299.1 billion. This list appears to be AdAge’s version of the Forbe’s 400:

The Media 100 offers a bottom-up view of media by tallying revenue from an array of products and services. This includes traditional media, internet services, cable providers and movies. Revenue sources include advertising, subscriptions, sales of movie tickets and DVDs, and fees from TV production/licensing.

The most important question: What’s this mean for me? It means when I graduate into the world with a piping hot journalism degree, ready to report, I might be screwed. On the plus side, this year will be slightly buoyed by the Olympics and the elections, so ad spending might remain slightly steady to just a tad off. Then again, come December when I’m done with school, I might be in big trouble.

Did you know I left undergrad in May 2002, when the economy went in the tank after September 11th? Now I’m getting my second degree a few months after the financial system blows up. I have impeccable timing.

UPDATE: It’s only getting worse.

MediaDailyNews, “found that the percentage of advertising budgets that are expected to increase over the next six months fell to 33% during the April/May period that its most recent survey was conducted, an eight percentage point drop from the Spring of 2007.”