(Tiper Stock Exchange) –
The negative trend for daily publishing is confirmed: in 2022, according to what emerges from the Agcom Communications Observatory, an average of 1.54 million copies were sold daily, in 9.4% decline compared to the corresponding value in 2021 and by 32.4% compared to the corresponding sales levels in 2018. Looking at the territorial distribution of copies sold, i.e. between the national (which represent 48% of the total copies in 2022) and local areas, the latter on an annual basis they recorded a more marked decline than that recorded by the national newspapers (-9.8% against -8.9%), but looking at the entire period analyzed (2018-2022) the sales of the national newspapers reduced to a greater extent than that observable for those with local diffusion (-35.7% vs -29.1%).
In 2022, on an annual basiscopies sold daily in paper format decreased by 9.9%, and by 36.4% compared to the value in 2018. Newspapers sold in digital format did not record any particularly significant changes (they hovered around an average of 210,000 copies per day in 2022), with a reduction on an annual basis (-6% ) but up (+12.5%) compared to the corresponding value in 2018, when copies were around 190,000 units per day. The distribution of sales of digital copies appears to be more concentrated than the printed one: the top five titles in the digital segment represent 59.4% of the total copies sold in 2022, while the corresponding value for the printed version drops to 34.3%.
In the fourth quarter 2022 average audience in the television sector decreased by 4.6% compared to the same period of 2021, going from 9.15 to 8.82 million; a similar trend was also recorded for the “prime time” slot (from 21.28 to 20.31 million viewers). . As regards the annual average, the reduction in viewers is even more evident: during 2022, viewers on the “average day” decreased, on an annual basis, by 810,000 viewers (from 9.25 million in 2021 to 8.44 million, -8.7%), correspondingly, audiences in the “prime time” slot fell by 2.23 million (from 21.71 to 19.48 million viewers, -10.3%). Extending the time frame of the analysis to 2018, audiences in 2022 fell by 2.9 million (-13%) in the “prime time” bracket and by 1.07 million (-11.2%) in the “day medium”, testifying to the progressive growth of the offer in streaming of video contents. In 2022, with reference to the average daily audience of the main television publishing groups, on an average day Rai leads the ranking with 3.20 million viewers (37.9% share) followed by Mediaset with 3.11 million (36.8 %), the furthest behind are Discovery (670,000), Comcast/Sky (620,000) and Cairo Communication/La7 (360,000).
AGCOM notes that at the end of last December in the fixed network, total accesses show a slight decrease on a quarterly and annual basis, respectively equal to -115 thousand and -84 thousand lines; the overall customer base remains close to 20 million lines. . During 2022 it should be noted that the traditional copper lines decreased by over 1.1 million (about 7.5 million in the last four years), while the lines using other technologies, in the same period, increased by about 920 thousand.