The French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) says it incurred "substantial additional costs" from covering the Arab Spring protests last year.
AFP, which approved its financial statements for last year on Wednesday, said sales were €281.4 million (Dh1.36 billion) last year, a slight increase on 2010. Its margins remained similar last year, despite the high costs of covering events in the Middle East and North Africa, AFP said.
"The operating margin behaved well, despite a particularly dense flow of news from Japan, North Africa and the Middle East," it said in a statement.
"[The] 'Arab Springs' taking place all year [entailed] substantial additional costs for coverage," the statement added.
Events in markets such as Egypt and Tunisia triggered a boom in reporting, although gaining access to countries such as Libya and Syria proved more difficult for the media. Despite bigger media audiences, disruption from the Arab Spring caused a decline in advertising revenues, which help fund the news operations of TV stations and newspapers.
According to the Arab Media Outlook published last week, the Arab Spring contributed to an estimated 10.3 per cent decline in advertising spending last year.
However, the regional unrest has also helped to improve media transparency, according to the Arab Media Outlook, which was published by the Dubai Press Club and Deloitte. According to the report, 79 per cent of people surveyed said the Arab Spring had increased press freedom, while 65 per cent said the quality of satellite TV news had improved.
In its financial statement, AFP also said it had doubled its multimedia output last year, and now produced between 150 and 200 videos a day in seven languages.
Online video is one of the fastest-growing internet categories globally. It is forecast to comprise more than 91 per cent of all Web traffic by 2014, according to a forecast from Cisco.