Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Drew McReynolds – RBC Capital Markets.
Drew McReynolds – RBC Capital Markets
I’ll start off with a few questions and then maybe circle back. Just on the specialty advertising decline of 8%, can you quantify precisely what the Easter impact was in there? Then also, with respect to the 12% sub growth can you break that down in broad strokes between what VIVA contributed and perhaps what pay television has contributed?
Paul W. Robertson
First of all the -8% in ad sales was particularly driven by the kids area as John said at the start. In terms of the way Easter fell, it certainly favored more revenue this year in to Q3 when last year it put more revenue in to Q2 so there was an effect there. But, I wouldn’t say would extraordinarily shift that -8% number. I think that’s pretty reflective of what we saw during the quarter despite that Easter impact although hopefully we’ll get a little bit of lift in Q3 as we get better comps compared to last year.
So that’s in on the ad sales side, in terms of the impact on subscriber revenue growth, importantly I think if you took out VIVA which is a good contributor on the sub revenue side, you were still left with a 4% revenue growth across the rest of the portfolio.
Drew McReynolds – RBC Capital Markets
Maybe a couple of follow ups here, maybe for John, can you just comment on pricing pressure across radio and specialty just in terms of ad rates? I’m just looking for comments on general trends here?
John M. Cassaday
Well I would say that there is considerable pricing pressure. Clearly, we’re seeing not only in radio but also in television now advertisers booking later. There’s no question that given the headlines about the state of affairs in newspapers and conventional television there are a number of advertisers that are concluding that all media companies are in the same difficult situation. Quite frankly, the demand on our women’s networks and our top performing radio stations gives us considerable insulation from that and we certainly recognize that our customers are struggling right now in many respects and are looking for help from us. But, we’re working very hard to hold our margins.
As you saw in this particular quarter we in fact improved our margins overall corporate and certainly increased them nicely on television. So, that’s probably as good a demonstration as I can give you of that. But, there is no question as this thing goes on everybody is looking for a deal. The top performing stations have got the best opportunity to hold their pricing and we’re working very hard at doing that.
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