Cornel Ion, General Manager of the RFI Romania station, who is continuously comparing the local and the French markets, said that the Romanian radio market will be more affected by the crisis and will bounce back slower than the neighbouring markets.
The local radio market declined 40 percent in terms of revenues this year, registering one of the sharpest drop rates on the media market. According to Ion, the Romanian market will bounce back six months after the French, German, and English markets. “Maybe at the end of 2010,” the official added.
“The problems on the radio media market could be harsher in Romania compared to other countries, because if they fall from the first floor to the ground floor, we could fall from the third floor to the ground floor. And this because they were a little more balanced than we were when they formed the market, adopting various formats, having different strategies, and they did not crowd in the same direction,” Ion indicated.
Luca Niculescu, RFI’s Editor-in-Chief, said that the Romanian radio market “is a market that is rich and poor at the same time: rich because there are many radio stations, and relatively poor because most of them have the same format, and there is no diversity. Furthermore, there is a general trend towards tabloid with too little content radio.”
According to Niculescu, RFI Romania – the local subsidiary of the French public RFI International station– has an annual budget of €700,000, of which about 20 percent is covered from revenues from advertisement, and the remainder by the French state. This year, however, the two RFI Romania officials estimated that revenues from publicity fell by half.
