ITV's television advertising revenues may be plummeting but income from ITV.com, the broadcaster's online TV service, looks on course to more than triple this year to over £30m.
To date, ITV has struggled to build a sizeable revenue stream from its digital activities, most recently selling off Friends Reunited at a £150m loss on its purchase price in 2005. However, analysts Screen Digest forecast ITV.com to make as much as £34m in ad revenue this year.
Screen Digest believes that ITV.com, which offers simulcasts and a catchup service for the broadcaster's shows, is gradually amassing a sizeable audience. It estimated ITV.com's revenues at £8.9m in 2008.
"The revenue increase comes from a mixture of increasingly large audience levels and ITV becoming a world leader in monetising its content," said Dan Cryan, an analyst at Screen Digest. "ITV have a higher number of ads running per programme viewed as video-on-demand than any other broadcaster in any other major market."
ITV's results for the first six months of the year showed that ITV.com's revenues had doubled year on year to £10m. Video views on ITV.com show a dramatic increase compared with the first half of 2008, from 31m to 116m. Screen Digest predicts that in 2009 Channel 4 will make £9.3m from its online TV service, 4oD, and Channel Five's Demand Five service will bring in £1.9m.
Screen Digest predicts that by 2013 ITV.com and 4oD will both make £75m in ad revenue, while Demand Five will pull in £17m.
ITV once set a target of making £150m from all of its online operations by 2010. But it extended this target to 2012 and then, as the scale of the advertising recession became apparent earlier this year, abandoned it altogether.
Screen Digest argues that ITV.com is doing well compared with much-lauded foreign services such as Hulu, the US online TV service backed by NBC Universal, News Corporation and Disney. Screen Digest estimates Hulu's revenues at $100m this year.
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