GMA New Media revenues jump 49% to M in H1
GMA New Media, Inc. (NMI), GMA Network’s digital media and technology arm, finished the first half of 2017 with an impressive 49 percent growth in consolidated revenues, the company said in a statement.
Driven by the surge in online advertising sales as well as NMI’s partnerships with dominant industry players, NMI raised its consolidated revenues to R168.4 million in H1.
Online advertising sales soared 135 percent to R113.2 million which was achieved through the collaboration between NMI and GMA’s Sales and Marketing Group (SMG). Year-todate sales from owned media (GMANetwork.com) through programmatic partners also grew by 39 percent. Revenues from NMI’s partnerships with content discovery and community-building platforms, led mainly by Facebook and YouTube, garnered a 62 percent increase versus last year.
NMI’s subsidiary, MediaMerge, capped off the first half of the year strong with a 418 percent growth in net profit. Techno-creative lab Digify, Inc., another NMI subsidiary, likewise continued the uptrend with a 25 percent increase in net income as of end June.
With all revenue sources contributing positively to its topline, NMI ended the first six months with a net income 311 percent higher than last year.
Recently, GMA, through NMI, inked a historic and unprecedented partnership with YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing website. The partnership allows viewers to access officially uploaded full episodes of GMA programs on www.GMANetwork.com/fullepisodes.
The deal not only supports the anti-piracy efforts of the Philippine entertainment industry, but more importantly, addresses millennial video viewing habits.
The total views for GMA’s main YouTube channel reached 1.986 billion in the first six months while YouTube revenues went up by 72 percent to US$ 543,114.
The GMA Entertainment-only YouTube channel has shown great improvement over the first six months of the year as views and watch time grew more than threefold at 362 percent and 365 percent, respectively.
The GMA Public Affairs YouTube channel showed remarkable year-onyear growth in both views and watch time, at 1172 percent and 1117 percent, respectively.
Meanwhile, Google Analytics data indicated that the pageviews of GMA’s official entertainment website (gmanetwork.com/entertainment) increased dramatically to 517.1 million, up by 76 percent over the same period last year. GMA News Online (gmanetwork.com/news), on the other hand, expanded its unique users by 13 percent, beating even last year's record-breaking numbers posted during the coverage of Eleksyon 2016.
Overall, metrics for the GMA portal are much better as its year-todate pageviews breached one billion mark. Pageviews were 170.8 million higher than last year, equivalent to 20 percent.