The twilight of advertising investment in Spanish regional televisions: bankruptcy of a financing model

Advertising investment in Spanish regional televisions, publicly owned media, was already below one hundred million euros in 2019. This broke a psychological threshold that, in turn, evidences the bankruptcy of a financing model that leads these media to almost total dependence on the general budgets of their respective autonomous communities. Over the past twenty years, this type of investment has experienced a drop of 76.6 percent, with an accelerated negative trend since 2015. In order to determine the scenario in which the advertising revenue of this television channel model is located and to identify its trend and impact on the management model, the last twenty years (2005-2019) have been analyzed, using the data collected in Infoadex's respective annual reports; for this purpose, a time series has been constructed that, due to its number of data, shows an acceptable robustness and consequently allows to achieve solvent results, albeit of an exploratory and approximate nature, aimed at serving as a reference for a subsequent study with methodology based on descriptive statistics. As a more significant conclusion, it should be noted that advertising investment in regional television shows a significant greater retraction than that of national television broadcasters and the revenues obtained from this business activity are destined to play an irrelevant role in their operating accounts, which leads to an urgent reformulation of their current management model.