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Week-to-Week Pacing Changes
Q2 Core pace fell 0.3 points this week due to a 1.2-point drop for June.
Some categories saw positive movement, including Fox, CW, MyNet, and Independent stations and the Northeast and West regions.
Week-to-Week Pacing Changes
This week Q3 Core Pace fell 5.1 points.
July fell 5.2 points.
August dropped 4.9 points.
September lost 5.0 points.
June continued its rally through the latter part of last week, but it has slowed since then. I think the month still has a bit of room to grow, particularly now that we are nearly past the month’s major political primaries, at least in some of the larger media markets. We may continue to see an advertiser or two looking to spend money before the end of the quarter, and the two broadcast July days of 6/29 and 6/30 should also receive a boost as more Q3 buys come down.
Speaking of Q3, the quarter has officially begun to break. We’ll still see another twenty or so points of business written between now and July 1, but major spenders like Comcast, Ford, Martin Retail, and others are now starting to fill up the quarter. Stations report more month-to-month buying activity than the traditional quarterly buying patterns we’ve seen in the past, and we see little NFL booked in September, which supports the idea that there’s still a lot of money yet to come in.
July is generally quite open for stations, as usual, and is probably the best place for your core advertisers who can’t afford to compete with political dollars for inventory later in the quarter. Many of you are pricing aggressively for that reason, and I encourage it. The first six weeks of the quarter should be very attractive to some of your lower-spending advertisers, so make sure they know it.
Here are my forecasts for the week:
Q2 vs. 2025:
April: -13.1%
May: -12.8%
June: -0.5% – up 2.9 points from last week
Q2 Total: -8.9% - up 0.9 points from last week
2026 vs. 2025:
Q1: -2.8%
Q2: -8.9%
Q3: -9.6%
Q4: -13.0%
2026: -8.2%
Published: 05-07-2026
Published: 05-28-2026
Published: 06-02-2026