"The quarter started on a good note with the festival season. However, subsequent economic dip hit sentiment and therefore the media spend. This in turn impacted advertising revenues for our English and Hindi print business," Sandeep Jain, Chief Strategy Officer, HT Media, said on the company's earnings conference call yesterday. Overall ad revenues for HT Media, which also has radio and digital businesses, declined by 5.7%, hit primarily because of an 8.6% decline in print advertising revenues. Comparing this year to the last, for the quarter ended December 31st 2016, according to Jain, "English print ad revenues degrew by 9.5%, Hindi was down by 7%, also due to the bihar base effect." Elections usually lead to an increase in spends, and the state elections in Bihar in the same quarter last year led to a higher base-line of ad spends. Impact of demonetization Advertising declined leading to lower newsprint costs, because "lower pagination" or fewer pages in newspapers. HT had "subdued revenues due to adverse economic sentiment post demonetization" "I mean as a consequence of demonetisation, even if you look at our competitors who have already declared results, and the other guys who will, you know the volumes are substantially lower. Even in December, I mean the full flurry of demonetization has been felt both in November and December. We are hoping that January will be better, but December was also substantially down." "There are few categories and sectors which have had a significant impact. For example the government category has actually…
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