Spain

Audience measurement organisations

Spain has several audience auditors, distributed by platforms. The one with the broadest spectrum is the Asociación para la Investigación de Medios de Comunicación (Association for Media Research - AIMC), which coordinates the Estudio General de Medios (General Media Survey - EGM). Based on tens of thousands of personal surveys distributed in three waves throughout the year, this survey analyses the audience of television, radio, daily newspapers, magazines, supplements, films and the Internet.

There are also measurement organisations segmented by media. The oldest one is the Oficina de Justificación de la Difusión (Circulation Audit Bureau - OJD), which has certified the circulation of printed publications since 1964. For Internet publications, the main measuring company is ComScore. In the field of television, in addition to the EGM, the multinational company Kantar Media also conducts audience surveys in Spain. There are also measurers of advertising investment in the media, such as Infoadex.

According to the APM (2016), the advertising billing of the media increased by 5 percent in 2015, compared to the previous year. Radio, in spite of being, in general terms, the sector that bills least (€389m), is the one that has shown a bigger rise (12 percent). Television follows the moderate upward trend of the last two years and is still the sector with the highest turnover (€3.318m). Newspapers and magazines, on the other hand, have continued to fall since 2011, although the rate of decline has been slowing down (2 percent and 1 percent, respectively).

Advertising investment follows the upward trend that began after 2013 (Salaverría, 2014), the year with the lowest results, and in 2015 it was around €4bn. The figures are still much lower than prior to the 2008 crisis, when more than $7bn were invested in advertising.