Radio revenues are down as well, and they're down sizably.
I'm going to use Ottawa as an example because that's the market I'm most familiar with, but it is representative of what's going on across the entire country. Over the course of the period of time since 2011, in the Ottawa market local television advertising revenue is down by 12%, and local radio advertising for our company is down 20%.
It's down for a couple of reasons, and this applies, as I said, to both television and radio. One reason it's down is that there's a fundamental change going on in local communities. The local retail landscape is very different today from what it has ever been at any time in the past. We are becoming communities of what I call boutiques and big-box stores. There is a level of business—“big small business” I call it—that in this country is disappearing. It's disappearing largely as a result of so many people adopting different shopping habits, those being shopping online.
The other big fundamental change going on in the advertising world is that “dollars to digital” doesn't necessarily mean dollars to digital advertising. What I mean when I say this is that the car dealer who's on the corner is being forced to make decisions now about how they spend every advertising dollar, and they need to be in the digital space. As a result of needing to be in the digital space, what they're doing is taking traditional advertising dollars and channelling them to website creation and maintenance and to creating and maintaining a social media presence. They're channelling those dollars to search engine optimization, and they're taking those dollars away from spending on advertising on local television and radio stations.
For my properties in Ottawa alone, my quick estimate as to the impact of that on an annual basis is $2.6 million a year, and it's growing fast. These are changes in which, no matter what I do and no matter what my staff does, we can't influence a difference. What we're talking about are fundamental structural changes in the manner in which the economy functions in this country at the local level, in communities such as Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Calgary, and Brandon, Manitoba, and Halifax, Nova Scotia. This is going on across the country from coast to coast.