Sýn executive challenges minister’s case for RÚV advertising

A senior Sýn executive has questioned Culture Minister Logi Einarsson’s claim that advertising revenue would largely leave Iceland if public broadcaster RÚV were removed from the advertising market, mbl.is reports.

Guðmundur H. Björnsson, Sýn’s managing director of sales and marketing, said he heard Einarsson make the argument in an interview on Bylgjan’s Sprengisandur programme.

RÚV receives funding through the state budget and also operates an advertising division. According to Guðmundur, the minister argued that experience from other countries showed advertising money did not move to domestic media when public broadcasters left the advertising market, but instead went to foreign companies.

Guðmundur said the Icelandic advertising market had changed substantially since private media outlets held about 80 per cent of advertising revenue in 2009. The biggest change, he said, was the arrival of the foreign technology companies Alphabet and Meta, which accounted for more than half of advertising revenue in Iceland according to Statistics Iceland figures from 2024.

He said he was therefore surprised that the minister had cited foreign examples to support the claim that advertising revenue would move to foreign media if RÚV left the market.

Questions comparison with Spain

Einarsson specifically referred to Spain, France and Latvia, saying that removing public broadcasters from the advertising market had resulted in most of the money leaving the country.

Guðmundur said he had examined what happened in those countries. In Spain, he found, the public broadcaster left the advertising market in 2010. Nine months later, advertising revenue at private media outlets had increased significantly, with almost all of it going to domestic media, he said.

Social media platforms were still relatively new in 2010 and had not yet captured a large share of advertising revenue, according to Guðmundur. He said he therefore did not understand how the Spanish example could support the minister’s conclusion.

Guðmundur said he wondered whether the ministry had data that had not been presented in the debate. If such information existed, he said, it would be useful to make it public and would contribute to the discussion.