The Dutch Media Authority has been publishing an annual Media Monitor since 2002 on on-going trends in the Dutch media landscape.

As RNW's Media Network reported, a special edition for an international audience in English in now available: Media Monitor - The Dutch media in 2010.

Based on the concept of the importance of pluralism, the report analyses the media concentration in the country, the protagonists of the newspapers, television, radio and Internet market as well as the recent developments in the news media field.

The general overview underlines that in terms of time spent using media, the most time in the Netherlands is devoted to radio, television, the Internet and newspapers.

The Netherlands, together with Germany and Sweden, is a pro-print country, with newspapers, daily and weekly, and magazines together accounting for more than 50 percent of the advertising expenditure. High importance is also devoted to the internet, while radio and television have a relatively low importance.

The newspaper market in the Netherlands is a relatively strong market with thirty newspapers per 100 residents. Dailies reach about 70 percent of the population, a large majority of which spends more than half an hour a day reading a daily paper.

As the report underlined, a characteristic of the Dutch media landscape is that a relatively high number of foreign media suppliers are active. Large players include the German Bertelsmann, with RTL Group, ProSiebenSat.1, which is also German, with SBS Broadcasting and British Mecom.

The Swedish publisher Metro has been present on the dailies market since 1999 with the free daily Metro. And in 2004 Apax, a private equity firm from Britain, bought PCM, the largest publisher of quality papers; in 2009 the Belgium Persgroep took control of PCM. In 2006 British Mecom bought two newspapers from Limburg and became the biggest publisher for regional papers after the takeover of Koninklijke Wegener in 2007. De Persgroep and Mecom now hold one-fifth of the total dailies market in the Netherlands.

Looking back on developments on the Dutch daily newspaper market, the number of titles declined considerably between 1987 and 2003, but it is striking that the number of daily titles in the Netherlands has been relatively stable since 2003 with about 40 titles. The total circulation of all dailies declined only somewhat during the last 10 years; while paid newspapers lost noticeably, free dailies gained importance.

The publisher with the largest market share is the Dutch Telegraaf Media Groep, with
the most important newspaper being De Telegraaf. This, together with foreign groups Mecom and De Persgroep, controls 70 percent of the total Dutch daily newspaper market.

In the Netherlands the internet is used by 46 percent of residents to consult online magazines and daily newspapers. With the exception of Sweden and the United Kingdom, this percentage is significantly higher than other countries. The most popular website in all the countries is the local version of Google.

You can find the entire report here.

Source: Media Network, Media Monitor