Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the presentation of the half- year results 2023 from the M6 Group. All participants are listening. We will have a Q&A session after this presentation. I would like now to give the floor to Nicolas de Tavernost, Chairman of the Executive Board. You have the floor.
Thank you very much. Good evening. These results for the first half of 2023 are sound in a more difficult context, which we're going to explicit. First of all, the beginning of the year was marked by the renewal of the frequency for 10 years by Arcom, within the M6 Group. That was an important operation. Regarding the activity, the uncertain economic context weighs on the advertising market, which is down this half year.
Estimates give us more than 8%, but we will have specific figures in a few days or weeks. In this context, the group has made an advertising revenue slightly above EUR 504 million, down 4.9% for the semester. The second quarter was worse than the first one. The group has preserved its profitability, nevertheless, and still has a margin above 20%, thanks to cost optimization. The margin is at 21.7%. The net profit is EUR 106.5 million , thanks to two structuring transaction, one on GSG and the disposal of its to the group. Among the key figures, revenue reaches EUR 629 million on a constant scope.
Outside of the consolidation of Best of TV, sold in November 2022, the advertising revenue is down 4.9%. Therefore, we have EBITDA reaching EUR 135 million versus EUR 161 million in the first half of 2022. The net profit is up 14.5% at EUR 106 million. In the first, the individual viewing time was down. Since it is 3 hours and 15 minutes, i.e. a reduction of 8 minutes . We have 2 hours and 16 minutes, minus 11%. The marketing of advertising was done on a lower element than the first half of 2022.
Television remains the most used media, the increase in non-linear has made it possible to increase quality contents, both for linear and streaming. In the face of this diversification, M6 is offering its offers in all markets, linear TV with free-to-air and pay TV, AVOD 6play and 6play Max. We've also signed agreements with social media. We will keep increasing our presence on all of the social media. Regarding the 25-49, the M6 Group is resigning the free-to-air channel have the same audience share, 20.6%, with a limited drop of 0.2. The DTT performance were satisfactory with the target commercial. W9 remains first, remains third. 6ter and Gulli increased by 0.1 in comparison with this quarter.
The group has focused its efforts regarding M6 on strategic slots in the evening. Historic brands make excellent performance on the commercial target, Top Chef, Pékin Express, Capital, et cetera. The channel makes good successes with its information magazine, with Capital, 21%, with the 25-49, the best season in the last 25 years. Enquête Exclusive, the second best season, Zone Interdite, the best season. The channel is making progress. It benefits from a number of successes, notably what is done with the morning magazine, Julien Courbet, in relation with RTL. The news bulletin worked very well. They are the second most watched by the 25-49 target. The group has been successful thanks to diversity of DTT. W9 has a recurrent offer of magazine that is very powerful for DTT.
6ter consolidates its position as first target, and it has the second-best audience on this target. In the first half, Gulli is the first youth channel. Gulli Prime is very successful. The pay channels have also reinforced their position. Paris Première consolidates its status as with its best wave. Téva is really increasing its audience, and it has been doing very well with women responsible for purchases. 6play is also very important on all media at all times. 6play is continuing its development in AVOD. We are privileging AVOD on SVOD. That has been our policy since the merger failed. We've decided to develop through 6play, a destination brand, the AVOD offer. We have a comfort offer without advertising around 6play Max.
In total, 6play, 16.8 million users a month, a leader in free platforms in terms of time per day, 1 hour a day. 6play is also the youngest platform, 53% is under 50, which is a natural complement in terms of advertising for linear channels. The enlargement of the AVOD offer was done with productions like C'est la famille. C'est la famille was very successful before it was put on linear channels. 6play Max offers an even more de-linear offer with exclusive programs, lives, and downloading. Regarding the radio division, RTL remains leader in the private groups, with an audience share of 18% for above 13. RTL is the first private radio in France. With an audience share of 12.5%, RTL2 reaches the best audience.
First music station, Fun Radio, has an audience share of 2.6%, growing again over a year. The division has reinforced on commercial targets with an increase of 15.3% on the half year for all of its channels. As far as the advertising activity is concerned, advertising revenue are down versus the first half of 2022. After first quarter, down 2.4%, the advertising revenue is down in the second half with -9.4%, with a revenue of EUR 427 million, -6%. Much for TV activity. Advertising revenue were impacted by the reduction in viewing time and a worse economic environment, but radio is resisting between advertising revenue are up 2.9% in the first half 2023.
I'd like to give the floor to my colleague, Jérôme, who's going to tell us about the sector analysis.
Thank you. In keeping with IFRS, these are the main figures for the activity of the group. TV is down by 5.7%, EBITDA minus EUR 13 million, identical reduction of EUR 30 million, reflecting this pressure on revenue with reinvestment in non-linear programs. For the radio segment, revenue is growing 4.9%, reflecting the advertising trend presented by Nicolas, and EBITDA is up, integrating the increase in advertising revenue and also more synergies with other antennas of the group, plus cost control we have stopped at beginning of 2022.
Regarding production and audiovisual rights, we have an increased revenue of 2.3% on the half year, thanks to the SND rights session, with a good activity in catalogs and broadcasting and distribution rights. Regarding EBITDA, the cinema have made only 1.5 million admissions versus 2.5 million last year. Based on the success of the movies, the result has integrated a reduction of 1.8%, 10.3%, and 37.7% of operating margin. Diversifications are down EUR 2.6 million on a constant, a like-for-like basis. As Nicolas said, we have sold Best of TV, which was fully present in the first half of 2022. The gap is EUR 14 million in revenue. Regarding the rest of activity, revenue is slightly down.
Stéphane Plaza maintains its high performance in a real estate market that is slowing down, kind of, the revenue of portals is slightly down because of the overall economic situation. Regarding now the equity methods, the diversifications in our portfolio, a major factors to underline: last year, we had a minus EUR 20 million, whereas this year, the result is positive, plus EUR 4.3 million. The gap is explained by three important activities. Bedrock, which is continuing its activities, investment in streaming for all of its customers. Of course, the absence of costs related to Salto in 2023, because this continuation was in March. The winding up was totally provisioned, therefore, a positive effect on the comparison of performance, EUR 12 million.
Finally, Global Savings Group, beginning of January, has had a major growth operation that has revalued our participation, because during that operation, a significant part in acquisition was paid in shares, which has revalued our participation. Besides, the group Pepper.com has brought a positive result, which has also made a positive contribution.
That's it for the EUR 25 million increase of the equity affiliates. Regarding the financial statements, I will come back to the overall results that we've just commented on. Regarding the balance sheets, there are a few major changes, excluding the traditional seasonal change in the first half, especially with some WCR effects, and also the equity impact of dividend distribution and the net impact on non-current assets with the revaluation of GSG, which is included with other impacts. The impact of GSG is EUR 13 million regarding the revaluation. In the cash flow statement for the half year, maybe a few comments. The self-financing capacity from operations is mostly the reflection of the lower operating income and also the diminished financial income. Then, we had better control over WCR than last year.
For a similar period, a EUR 20 million improvement, and the tax disbursements were low in 2023 because of the traditional impact of the remainder of taxes. Last year, we had an additional tax, whereas this year, we had a tax reimbursement at the end of May when we liquidated our pending taxes. No significant changes on the other lines, as we started the half year with a higher level of cash than last year. We ended at a higher level, EUR 305 million in on assets.
Regarding ESG and EUR 199 closing balance. For ESG and CSR, we had a number of measures and action plans in place. Here you've got quantitative illustrations with the fact that we can see that we complied with the 30% requirement of the Loi Rixain by 2025. We already have 34% of women in the group's leadership bodies, and 44% of leadership roles are filled by women. I'll throw it back over to Nicolas.
Regarding the outlook for the second half of the year and our game plan, first of all, we'll strengthen our presence in content. We have a program to strengthen our presence in all contents for the group that will be applied mostly from 2024 onwards, but we'll accelerate in streaming and the AVOD platform by focusing in AVOD investment with 6play Max, which is working well on this comfort offer.
To support the growth of diversifications and rotate and recycle our diversifications, we are in exclusive negotiations with Prisma Media to sell off the brands, theme brands and Cuisine AZ, Passeport Santé, Déco, Turbo, M6 Météo, Croq'Body, and others. These eight brands are covered by exclusive negotiations. We developed that digital portfolio with 18 million unique visitors, with growing revenues and profitability. Faced with the big digital players, there is a need for consolidation. Faced with social media in this context, the M6 Group will allow its digital cluster to become bigger by joining Prisma Media, which is growing internationally. The considered operation should be concluded after the summer, and there will be a positive contribution to the net income of the group, so that it can have additional resources for extra investment to transform its business, where there is an action plan.
Now I'll take your questions about that. Regarding the advertising outcome, outlook, the future is still uncertain, with a lot of volatility. Since the beginning of the summer, we've been recording positive signals for the second half.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are ready to answer your questions. To ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. Two, please press star again if you want to leave the queue. We'll take a moment to compile the waiting queue.
The first question is by Julien Roch from Barclays. You have the floor, sir, Mr. Roch.
Yes, good evening, Nicolas, Jérôme, and Myriam. My first question, after the failed merger with TF1, you said that the goal was to switch audiences from linear to AVOD, and it was a priority, and you would invest consequently. Could you give us an order of magnitude of the additional investment envelope, maybe the programming cost goal for the year? That was the first question.
Second question, could we have a measure of your total ratings in daily minutes in H1 with the split between linear and nonlinear? Your goal is to switch viewers, but so we don't really know where you are, so you can't track your progress. That was question two. Third question, to come back to your comment on advertising, positive signal since the beginning of the summer, what's that mean? Does that mean that advertising is positive on TV in July and August? Thank you.
Thank you for those questions regarding the investment program in content. Programming costs account for about half a billion EUR, a total budget for the year. We should stay within this envelope for the year 2023, with a number of redeployments. In particular, we didn't renew the French soccer contract, which led to significant losses to reinvest in other program categories that are more suited to streaming. We'll show a plan for the years 2024 and subsequently, when we present the budget to shareholders for 2024 and subsequent years, with a stronger content that we are currently modeling. Regarding total ratings, it's difficult to give you the results of linear ratings for the group on the commercial target, with 20.6% audience rate for all channels, all free-to-air channels, 20.6% on the commercial targets, viewers. As you said, we can't agglomerate replay audiences because the measurements are not the same.
Regarding the GRP and CPM measurements on replay viewers, there should be a change in 2025 to identify the CPMs on our assets. What I said on the 6play platform is that we have significant ratings, with 1 million visitors consuming at least 1 hour on average a day, for all of our programs offered on the 6play platform. We'll probably have an opportunity to give you more details about all of our streaming activities. On advertising, what I told you is that we have positive signals for July. Indeed, it's a bit early to say anything about the other months. I would simply say that we have base effects that are a bit more favorable in H2 than they were in H1.
I'll remind you that for the year 2022, we had a more complicated base effect, we should have an easier second half compared to 2022. Well, that remains to be confirmed by the economic activity with relatively high volatility.
If I could come back over my second question, I understand that advertising right now is sold differently on linear with GRP and digitally, the commercial office can't be compared. I wanted to know regarding the minute consumption, because if you said that you had 16.6 million viewers, users on average, and they spend at least one minute, you know how many minutes they consume, and you know the numbers of linear minutes. Why can't you compare total minute consumption of all your programs on all media?
Those are internal analyses that we do program by program, but that would get very complex. What matters is the number of people registered on 6play, the age of those subscribers, the average viewing time on 6play, and we can discuss that very concretely, but simply, this is high consumption, and that will match, and there will be a match. Secondly, advertising on our 6play platform is sold in two ways: once on the managed networks that are the telco networks, the four ISPs, and also on devices and directly. Advertising is sold more in value on non-managed networks. We are in discussions with managed networks to improve the value of advertising and the volume of advertising on 6play, for 6play on managed networks
That's a big battle for us because we want to claim back control of our data in order to have more effective advertising, more effective advertising on managed networks, where we have more room for growth.
Thank you.
Once again, to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We have no further questions. I will give the floor back to Mr. Nicolas de Tavernost to wrap up this session.
Well, our first half was fairly challenging given the advertising activity. We are going to significantly grow our 6play platform in the next few months. In connection with our linear content, because most of our audience comes from linear content, to answer the previous question, we can reckon that non-linear viewers are 7%-8% of our overall viewership for our channels.
This needs to grow because the decline in viewing time, linear viewing time, is slightly higher than 10%. We need to be able to offset that. That's why we have an investment program. Secondly, the diversification policy helps because as you saw with GSG, we made major investments because there's now an improvement in our net income, thanks to GSG, and we are rotating our investments. There will be disposal gains after the projected disposal of our digital business with Prisma, mostly focused on those eight brands. A first half of the year with work well underway, and the second half, I hope will confirm a recovery on the advertising market compared to the second half of 2022.
Have enjoy your summer, everyone. We'll meet again for the full year results at the beginning of the year, of next year in February. The date has not been definitively set. Thank you very much. Enjoy your summer.
This conference call is now over. Thank you for taking part in it. You can now disconnect.