Nine Entertainment, giving a trading update to shareholders at its annual general meeting, wouldn't give a full year forecast.
The six moths to December was outlined clearly, with a "robust" advertising market continuing.
Metro free-to-air advertising revenue for the half year is expected to be up by more than 6% on the same half last year.
Nine’s first half EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation), before specific Items, is expected to be up by around 10% on the first half last year, after accounting for targeted investments in Stan Sport, 9Now and the company's publishing division.
But Nine believes it is "too early" to give guidance for the full year result.
Chairman Peter Costello, responding to a question from AdNews: "You've just got to remember that the the last of lockdowns only got lifted in in November.
"And we would expect with the lifting of those lock downs certain things that have been down would come back, like travel advertising for example.
"But we're just not quite sure how strongly we'll come back.
"We were given a pretty specific guides for the first half. And we'll just sort of sit back and wait a bit for the second half.
"But it's not because we think there's going to be anything abnormal. It's not that reason. It's just we just want to see how things again develop."
CEO Mike Sneesby, in response to a question at a media briefing, says Nine is seeing a consistently strong market at a broad level.
"We're very happy with how things have opened up for the first calendar quarter next year."
The strategy is unchanged.
Sneesby: "The strategy for the business is centered on continuing to shift out still largely traditional media businesses into what will be their digital future.
"And I think sometimes we get a bit of ahead of ourselves ... that the market is so well mature and developed.
"But quite seriously, across all of the categories, the evolution into digital is at quite an early stage, whether it be streaming, whether the way our publishing business is shifting towards digital and subscriptions, and radio now where you'll see that with the volume of streaming of our talk radio network, increasing rapidly, the opportunity there exists.
"It will be very much in the next four years around those digital growth opportunities."
Costello: "We encourage everybody to take some online subscription.You can get a bundle product, which is both online and paper. If you still want the paper ... we would encourage that.
"But we we made no secret that it's our plan to have more people on digital subscriptions than buying the printed paper.
"That doesn't mean we want to see less people buy the printed paper, it's just that we want to see more people take digital subscriptions.
"And we were at about that tipping point now, where certainly the take up in the business is is all digital. And we we intend to drive that further and our future will be in the publishing business.
"Our future will be digital subscriptions and to a lesser degree digital advertising."
A slide form the AGM presentation:
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