Yurate Gurauskaite Russky Telegraf , September 16 1998. The first thing that the crisis hurt more than anything else was companies' revenue. What is obvious is that in the situation of a collapse of the financial market, growth of unemployment and a decline in purchasing power, foreign advertisers prefer not to take risks. The collapse of the advertising market for central broadcasters, first and foremost those with state participation, is fraught with the loss of the main sources which feed their operating budgets, and for television production companies, with the loss of supplemental sources of income. The second thing hit hard by the crisis was the external payment settlements of television companies.
Payments now take weeks to reach their receivers, and sometimes never get there.
The entire business is coming to a standstill. Far from everyone is willing to take his partner's word these days. It's also obvious that sudden changes in the currency exchange rates depreciate all ruble settlements made between television companies and their partners. As a result, non-cash settlements on the television market have effectively stopped. All payments have been frozen.