Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this presentation of the Q3 results for M6. All participants are in passive listening, but there will be a Q&A session right after this. For your information, this session is being recorded. Now I give the floor to Nicolas de Tavernost, head of the management board, and Jérôme Lefébure, who is the CFO.
Good evening, and thank you for attending this presentation of our Q3 results. I shall be brief. Jérôme Lefébure will give you details of the numbers and will be there to take your questions. Q3 2022 has a number of features. Both the income and EBITDA was sound. If you leave out non-recurring items, that is state aid and the expenses related to the abandoned merger with TF1, stood at EUR 57.2 million, compared to EUR 58 million in Q3 2021, and EUR 34.2 million in Q3 2019.
The decline in revenues, which was compensated by a savings on the programming costs, the optimizing of radio costs, and the contribution of Stéphane Plaza Immobilier to the results of Q3, which was not the case in 2021. If you leave out non-recurring items, the operating margin was up 0.7 percentage points to 19.7% in Q3.
If you look at the first nine months of 2022, the revenues were stable at EUR 954 million. The increase in non-advertising revenue, about 11%, was offset by a slight decline in advertising revenues, about -0.24%. At the end of September 2022, the consolidated EBITDA, excluding non-recurring items, stood at EUR 222.7 million, up 5.5% year-on-year, reflecting in particular the group's flexibility in managing its cost, the synergies developed between all of its channels and the contribution again of Stéphane Plaza Immobilier, including non-recurring items, which include government aid, EUR 1.1 million versus 18.7 in the first nine months, and expenses related to the M6 TF1 merger, EUR 6.9 million, compared to EUR 6.2 million at September 2021.
The group's consolidated EBITDA stood at EUR 216.9 million, and the operating margin stood at 23.3%, excluding again non-recurring items, up 1.2 percentage points year-on-year. The quarter was marked with several things. The revenue of the television was slightly down 9.8%. First, because the summer wasn't good, July and August. As I mentioned during the presentation of the H1 results, the summer was poor. Well, first, comparison effect. You may remember last year that we had the Euro football competition, including the final. So of course, that drew in the large audiences, and the summer also met challenges in the market. September was better. We'll give you our outlook for Q4 in a moment.
Then radio did rather well in terms of advertising revenue, and digital also enjoyed some growth, which made it possible to contain the decline in advertising revenue to 8.2% over that quarter. Revenue was down in this last quarter, in third quarter, but there were savings that compensated that. Operating profit was better than 2019. It's slightly down compared to last year. These are the numbers for the first nine months of the year, Q1 and Q3. In terms of if we focus on the actual businesses of the group, after the failed merger with TF1, you may remember that, all that time, we were still competitors while looking at the merger, since all of 2021 and the beginning of this year.
Business was good for our television programs, especially on M6 and especially on prime time, where the performance was very good. Likewise, the digital business, as we said in the press release, and radio enabled us to be leaders in private radios on that segment. You can see that there is a contribution of new businesses, in particular, Stéphane Plaza Immobilier. Thanks to that, we were able to maintain good revenue. What are our strategic objectives for the rest of the year and indeed for 2023? Now, of course, the economic context has deteriorated. On Q4, we're looking at stable results.
October was okay, including compared to 2021, and let me remind you, that was a good month. November and December may be more challenging. There's, of course, the World Cup effect that took some of the initial investment.
We have little visibility on November and December, but we're expecting to be below, significantly below 2021. Pretty much in line with 2019. Slightly down compared to 2019, at least that's our forecast today. October should be satisfactory, but November and December more difficult. Regarding our well, the outlook for 2023, it's pretty difficult at this stage to tell you what the well, advertising trends will be. We're looking at the budgets. A number of steps were taken first to contain programming costs, well, costs in general, but programming costs in particular. For instance, we give up on the football World Cup because that generates major losses.
We can reallocate these sums to and make savings on programming. We have an outlook on streaming. 6play is still growing. This month we launched 6play max, which is a sort of a comfort version of 6play that enables viewers to have an easier access. This is doing quite well, and this will continue throughout 2023. We'll have to think about Salto as regards now the future of Salto. We'll have to discuss this with our partners at France Télévisions and TF1 to take stock. Right now, Salto is on track for 2022. It's a pretty ambitious policy regarding streaming.
We have renewed our agreements with Canal+ for a multi-annual agreement starting in 2023. This has been secured. We are looking at developing new programs, especially on prime time. Diversification is still underway. We have taken a number of options, especially on major diversifications that will be developed in 2023 and 2024. Of course, the economic circumstances are beyond our control, and at this stage, we simply haven't got enough to look at when the first months of 2023. This is what we have to say about the performance, and now Jérôme and myself are here to take your questions. Very well.
If you need to put a question, press star one on your phone, on your keyboard. Question number one comes from Christophe Cherblanc from Societe Generale. Go ahead.
Good evening, and thank you for taking my questions. I have three questions. Number one, on the costs of the French team, you said they had 46 games a year, and you said it's a EUR 2 million loss. Is that in EBIT, or is it something that is simply programming costs? Question number two on Netflix. They have launched their new offer, and I'd like to know whether, well, what was your assessment of their offer, their relevance, its potential, and do you think this is a threat for your own programming business or, indeed, a threat to Salto or to other traditional operators?
Final questions on programming costs, you know, for 2022. H1 was the same as 2019. In terms of top line, is this realistic? You were at about EUR 260 million in H2. Is that the sort of a top ceiling, or do you think you can do better than that?
Thank you. Regarding the French football team, well, we cannot disclose the cost of broadcast, but the economic loss is about EUR 2 million per match, per game. That's the balance between the price we pay and the advertising revenue. There's also a lost earnings from other programs, so it adds up to EUR 2 million per game. That's significant, especially because large sports events, of course, could not generate much streaming revenue, so we've decided to spend that money on other products. We had, in fact, five games planned. So we had two more this year with the French national team because there was the Nations League as well.
On average, this was five games a year that we used to broadcast. We'll be simply sharing out Euro 2024. We also have audiovisual rights on W9, and that's the Europa League and the Conference League. Now, that's being broadcast on W9, and that's much more profitable, more so of course than the national football games. Then there's a Women's League that is also shown on W9. Now this is a sort of a one-off, but in 2024 we'll have the final of the Champions League, and there we certainly hope that a Parisian club can be part of that competition. That's with football.
Regarding advertising revenue and the platforms, we're looking at Disney+ and Netflix, but Amazon as well has its own platform. Indeed, they were a serious competition during the football final. These are competitors that decided to enter the market with high prices, and we can only welcome that. In fact, they are much more expensive than traditional TV. That's what we can see. We have no further information at this stage. I mean, that's all we know in terms of price and competition. Regarding advertising, we have only a very sort of limited duration because these are hybrid platforms, partly VOD and partly live.
These are competitors, of course, and in terms of volume they have. Their advertising business is not much competition. The price is high, so we'll see how it goes. We'll be competitors not so much in terms of volume of VOD services or consumption of such services, but be competitors on the digital mode. That is all our streaming operations and the VOD. They will be competing at pretty high prices on addressed advertising and other services. Regarding programming costs, on the year as a whole, we'll be looking at a lower cost. We've been able to reduce them by about 4% compared to 2021 for television.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Julien Roch from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Good evening. I do apologize, you may have already partly answered the question, but it took me 15 minutes before I could connect it, so I missed the beginning of your presentation. Question number one was about advertising trends for Q4. Can you give us any kind of guidance? Also, although these are early days, I believe you've been talking with major advertising agencies for next year, so Q4 and next year regarding advertising. Question number two is about advertising on platforms. You said that the prices were high, and indeed, everywhere they're higher than VOD, even though there's only four minutes of advertising.
This is a very short duration advertising. How much of an encroachment is this on the market? Also, would the money come more from targeted advertising as you have, say, with Facebook or Google? Or would it be straight to TV advertising? These are my two questions.
Regarding Q4 advertising revenue, October looks okay, as I said, especially compared to 2021, which itself was a good month. November and December will be more difficult. There'll be a World Cup effect. As you may remember, there was lots of money invested in that. Q4, we cannot give you much guidance.
Well, of course, Q4 is still underway, but we're expecting a decline in advertising revenue for Q4 compared at least to Q4 2021. We certainly hope that we will be close to 2019, which is the baseline. As it was, you may remember that 2021 had a post-lockdown boom, which we haven't got this year. We tend to look to 2019 as a reference, as a benchmark. Platforms, indeed, the rates, the prices are high. They do use addressed or targeted advertising, really competing on digital advertising, but of course, we're not in a position to give you any indications on the part of either customers or advertisers.
I imagine some customers will try it out, see what kind of return on investment they're getting on these platforms, and they'll make their decisions for 2023. The competitive environment is more targeted than mass market advertising, so we're looking at digital advertising and indeed the social media. You may remember that in the U.S., some of the social media are experiencing challenges there. We ourselves have got to be on the lookout for such competition. What we can expect is that there will be an upscaling throughout 2023. I do not expect much competition in terms of volumes for 2023.
Thank you.
No further questions on the waiting list. If you do have a question, please press one on your keyboard.
I believe there must have been some sort of technical problems. The operator may not have connected everyone. It looks as though not everybody was able to connect. Some people were left out at the beginning of the session. We gave you the numbers for Q3. Operating profit was about 20% on Q3. We are in line with last year for the first nine months. We had good programming revenue both on radio and TV and digital TV, which meant that we were able to keep our market share. All in all, this is a transition year.
Compared to 2019, we are expecting an acceptable landing compared to 2019. Maybe one final question then. Yes. Christophe Cherblanc from Societe Generale. Please go ahead.
I'd like to take this opportunity. There are not many of us on this call. I had two follow-up questions. The contribution of Stéphane Plaza, the consolidation effect, can Jérôme Lefébure give us detail? Another question I was asked time and again on management, I believe you will be staying on to supervise the merger with TF1, but that's not happening anymore. What are your plans in terms of governance? Jérôme.
On Stéphane Plaza, it says so in the press release, the consolidation brought in EUR 7 million in revenue for Q3. In terms of EBITDA, it's significant. At least we go from 6.4%- 14.4% in EBITDA, so that's mostly due to Stéphane Plaza. Regarding governance, well, there were two years while the application was being considered for the merger. That fell through. Shareholders and the supervisory board wanted some stability during that period. Well, as I mentioned, at the end of this merger plan, that instead of that we'll have partnerships. This is still being done, so this is not a good time for changes in management.
Thank you. Well, no further questions.
I will give the floor to your host to complete this presentation. Well, thank you.
Well, we will be back for the full year's performance for 2022 and the outlook for 2023, hoping we haven't got major disasters. Thank you.
Thank you. Well, this brings the call to an end. Thank you for attending. You may now put your phone down.