For Newspapers, Print Dying and Web Lagging
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 21, 2007 | Share This
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The Newspaper Association of America reported yesterday that Q3 advertising revenue for newspaper websites is up 21.1%. Good news for online, except print revenue is down 9% in the same quarter, for an overall decline of 7.4% in newspaper ad revenue, which means online is not bridging the revenue gaps despite the huge increase. PaidContent has some good context and a recap of the NAA’s release. I find it interesting and maybe a little telling that the NAA doesn’t have a better breakdown of where revenue’s being generated online (emphasis mine):
Advertising on newspaper websites now accounts for 7.1 percent of total newspaper ad spending, compared to 5.4 percent in Q3. Still, the NAA is only able to offer a general picture of newspapers’ website advertising, as it doesn’t break out online classified or other web-related segments.
Nevertheless, the NAA’s number do offer some context for a bright spot within a struggling industry, noting that total Q3 ad revenues at newspaper companies fell 7.4 percent to $10.9 billion. Meanwhile, print classified ads were down across the board for real estate (-24.4 percent), jobs (-19.7 percent) and autos (-17.7 percent).
Alan Mutter’s post at Silicon Alley Insider puts the news into perspective; adjusting for inflation only makes things bleaker (emphasis mine):
If you subtract this year’s likely $42.7 billion in print-ad revenues from the constant-dollar value of the sales a decade ago, the difference of approximately $10 billion means that today’s revenues are nearly 20% lower than they were in 1997. On a constant-dollar basis, therefore, industry sales this year will be about one-fifth lower than they were in 1997.
And Ashkan Karbasfrooshan draws interesting parallels between the newspaper-web and TV-online video dichotomies, arguing that TV will be in bigger trouble in five to ten years than print is in now if it treats the web with the same way newspapers used to:
I actually think TV will get hammered even more than print because digital video content is, for lack of a better word, has a higher beta. In other words, if you embrace digital distribution and apply it to video content, the sky is the limit. TV companies don’t because doing so will shrink their businesses, as embracing or fearing the Web has done to print companies. But if you try to go against the major trends and shy away from the Web, then it will kill you far faster, more lethally.
Topics: Advertising: Offline, Advertising: Online, Online Video, Publishing |
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt The Newspaper Association of America reported yesterday that Q3 advertising revenue for newspaper websites is up 21.1%. Good news for online, except print revenue is down 9% in the same quarter, for an overall decline of 7.4% in newspaper ad revenue, which means online is not bridging the revenue gaps despite the huge increase. PaidContent has some good context and a recap of the NAA’s release. I find it interesting and maybe a little telling that the NAA doesn’t have a better breakdown of wher […]
nice stats