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CCTV's ad revenue jumps

China may be adamantly against a US-led war in Iraq, but the nation's state-owned media companies have cheerfully capitalized on surging advertising revenues as companies race to place ads during television broadcasts from the battlezones.

With more than 400 million Chinese said to be glued to their television sets watching developments unfold in Iraq, state media conglomerates broadcasting unprecedented live daily coverage of the war have been rewarded with soaring advertising revenues.

"Our statistics show that viewer rates at CCTV [China Central Television] jumped 28 times since we began our live broadcasts of the war in Iraq, which of course attracted many firms to put their ads on our channels," said an advertising executive at the flagship channel, who requested anonymity.

In March, income from commercials at CCTV, China's largest nationally owned media group, increased by 100 million yuan (US$12 million), a 30 percent jump over the same period a year ago.

The company forecasts another 100 million-yuan rise in April, which means the network will have achieved 20 percent of last year's 850 million yuan in advertising-derived income in just two months.

Such handsome profits have spurred many of CCTV's network of 12 channels to move to a CNN-style of round-the-clock-coverage, bringing the war vividly into Chinese living rooms nationwide.

Never before has such extensive coverage of a news event been seen in China and is a radical departure from the usual steady digest of carefully nurtured party propaganda meant to legitimise the rule of China's ruling mandarins.

At CCTV International, the network's English-language station, executives were well prepared for the opening salvoes of the Iraq war, embedding Chinese reporters within the coalition military, just like other overseas news groups.

And like its largely western counterparts, within minutes of the first strikes on Iraq by US and British forces, CCTV International was reporting live on the scene and shifting to 24-hour coverage of the conflict.

Other CCTV channels responded in similar fashion.

"Before the war we had about 285 minutes of news per day, but after the war started it reached as much as 13 hours a day of war-related news coverage," said an executive at CCTV-4 in Beijing, who gave his last name as Wang.

China may not be about to establish an independent press, but market forces are in large part responsible for its radical departure in news gathering, said Yu Hai, a sociology professor at Fudan University.

"Chinese media have to be freer, or at least to act in the same way as their foreign counterparts, since commercial needs, amid harsher competition from other TV stations, make it the right way to attract a larger audience. As the number of viewers increase so will their income," Yu said.
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