Friday, November 8, 2019

Collapse in Advertising Revenue Means Moscow May Require Russians to Pay for Broadcast TV, Voloshina Says


Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 3 – As the television audience has declined and advertisers have cut spending on TV advertising, Moscow’s main television stations despite their state subsidies are in financial trouble. As a result, one online outlet says, some reportedly are thinking about requiring Russians to pay for their broadcasts via monthly communal service charges.

            Given the ability of the state to finance its chief form of propaganda for itself, commentator Viktoriya Voloshina says, this seems at first blush to be only a sick joke. But in Putin’s Russia, she continues, such jokes often precede a decision to make what some are now laughing about a reality (censoru.net/2019/11/03/proigral-i-holodilnik-i-televizor.html).

The federal channels have been losing “not only viewers but with them advertisers,” both of which are shifting to the internet.  If advertising money declines, the commentator suggests, the television stations will not have the money to modernize their broadcasts and will lose viewers even more rapidly, a vicious circle only taxing the population can break.

As Voloshina puts it, “the country has divided up into two camps: those who still remain true to television and those who have shifted to the internet for information and entertainment. The first is condemned to defeat because its adepts are aging and dying off.”

In this situation, she says, the Kremlin has only two choices: improve television, something there may not now be money for, or close down YouTube “or better the entire internet” so that people will have no choice but to watch television.

What this means is that the supposed contest between the television and the refrigerator has ended but in an “unexpected” way: both have lost. There is indeed less food in the refrigerator but at the same time people aren’t turning to the television. Instead, they are relying on the internet, a final judgment of the Putin system both ideologically and practically.

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