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Newspaper Ad Revenues Fall to 50-Year Low in 2011
- pg 15y agoThat is a really dramatic graph. It's hard to imagine an industry coming back from something like that.
- Cushman 15y agoWas it easy to imagine printed news coming back before seeing the graph? (Snark aside, it's a good point-- there must be similar graphs for the ice or telegram industries, to name two. Could make a pretty cool art installation or something.)
- patio11 15y agoThe really "Holy cow" bit for me is that even if you add the online revenue back in, the graph is virtually identical. If you had asked me this morning about the future of print newspapers, I would have said "Totally toast, of course, but savvy ones will move online." If you ask me now, I'd say "Totally toast. Your children may recognize the names of a couple of them, if they happen to regularly visit one of a handful of niche websites." Pick an industry you might think the US has largely abandoned to cheap foreign competition, like say textile manufacturing. Think all of our clothes are made in China? I'll bet you the US' textile manufacturing revenues graph looks substantially more favorable than that.
- Cushman 15y agoAnd I'd be happy to say "Serves them right," but the real tragedy here is that with them dies the very idea that journalism is a service worth paying money for. At least we're outsourcing manufacturing to professionals...
- InclinedPlane 15y agoIt does serve them right. As a rule they abandoned the helm of serious journalism years ago and have largely engaged in shallow pursuits that generate easy money since then. The amount of money spent on serious journalism at newspapers engage is so incredibly tiny it might as well be non-existent.
- nextparadigms 15y ago> but savvy ones will move online. Did you expect the savvy ones to be more than 50% of the players? Only a minority of them will move successfully online, but they have no one to blame but themselves. This is common with most disruptions.
- chc 15y agoAs somebody actually in the newspaper industry, I've been telling everyone who will listen for years now that the future of news does not look like newspapers, not even online ones. The idea of an "online newspaper" is like a horse-drawn carriage with mechanical horses are powered by gasoline — it obviously should be a car, but that's what you'd end up with if you were too tied to the idea of horses to let it go. The trouble for newspapers is that they're used to having a certain scale and mode of operation. The future of news is small teams running a website with little of the ceremonious structure that defines a newspaper. As long as they're lean, they'll be able to take in enough revenue to keep writers living like writers mostly do today. But I don't think there's any way to squeeze the New York Times into that shape.
- rmc 15y agoWhat's your idea of the future of news?
- euroclydon 15y agoWho pays for investigative journalism in that paradigm? It sounds like the whole concept of a journalist is going out the window. It will be up to the soldier to write his own account of a battle, rather than an embedded journalist, etc, etc.
- chc 15y agoYou seem to be using an extremely narrow definition of "investigative journalism." Most investigative journalism will go on about as much as it always has. Some member of the team will investigate a topic and write about it. That's what investigative journalism is. If you specifically mean war reporting, I don't know. I suspect some kind of nonprofit will spring up to fund reports on wars, but that's contingent on it actually being something any appreciable number of people value as much as it costs.
- yirt 15y agoI know a few companies with rather successfully sell "Made in USA, from USA-sourced fibers" blankets in the $200 to $2000 range. The outlook is considerably more favorable if you go after the market segment with usefully high margins vs. raw market share (see also: Apple).
- brandnewlow 15y agoThankfully, "newspapers" != "journalism".
- ghurlman 15y agoSadly, "The new hit-based payment model" != "journalism".
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nodata 15y agoSo, does this graph show that companies spend the same amount of inflation-adjusted dollars on newspaper advertising as they did in 1950? Were things good back then? What happened before the 50s?
- bodyfour 15y agoIf the chart had been adjusted for population, the decline would been even more dramatic. 1950's $20B (2011) USD was in a country slightly less than half the size of the US today. In fact, if you look at the curve from 1950-2000 you see it seems to approximately track the population growth from 1950, with a weird peak in ~1990 and trough a few years later. My hunch is that the previous state of the industry was that it reliably took in ~$130/yr/US resident (again, in current dollars) year after year. Now it takes in less than half that, and it's plummeting.
- esun 15y agoThe future of newspapers is more local. Once they divest themselves of expensive presses, unions, and other legacy line items, the actual cost of producing a local news story is low. There's a successful business in there, just a much smaller one. In many ways, it's a return to the start of newspapers.
- roel_v 15y ago"The future of newspapers is more local." Well, here in Europe you're empirically being shown wrong. Local newspapers disappear the first; first step is that they're bought by a larger entity, second step is the removal of local news from them (because too expensive to write up), third step is killing them. Then, after a large brand has killed several smaller ones, they get bought by a bigger entity or go bankrupt. I'm not sure how you can say that producing a local news story is cheap. It's very expensive on a per-reader count (which is all that matter) because there are relatively few readers. If you write a national story, you can sell it to everybody in the country. If you write a local story, you can only sell it to a subset of those people. Writing about a bake off costs the same as writing about a political debate on a national topic. It's quite obvious that writing for a small audience is a lot harder to have a positive ROI than for a large audience.
- EliAndrewC 15y agoThat's interesting, because I always think of the Lawrence Journal World (the creator of the Django web framework) and Adrian Holovaty's excellent writeup of how they thrive by excelling at local news: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/ http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/
- jeremymims 15y agoRoel, this path has already happened in the United States. In fact, we're in yet another round of consolidation where private equity groups are purchasing large stakes in the largest newspaper companies. What we're starting to see is the rebirth of local community publications like non-profit donation supported pubs: http://www.newhavenindependent.org http://www.newhavenindependent.org and http://www.texastribune.org http://www.texastribune.org. We're also starting to see rapidly expanding for-profit groups like Community Impact. Who would have thought that relentlessly focusing on quality content would pay off? It's often easier to get local advertisers to buy into the idea that they'll be targeting a local audience. Why wouldn't your bake-off article example be sponsored by the local grocery store or law firm? Which local advertiser wants to appear next to the national political debate article?
- MrGrey 15y agoBye bye. You won't be missed.
- DevX101 15y agoI knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad. And although the rate of decline seems to be decreasing, it looks like they still haven't hit rock bottom yet. There's more pain to come.
- frankydp 15y agoI thought about this the other day. When i recently moved i decided to get the paper delivered. It was a nice idea but ended up being TOTALLY overwhelming. The amount of time required to sift through and consume only a small part of the paper is insane. I had only payed some nominal fee 10 dollars for 3 months or something. But i had to call it quits after 2 months. Every paper was 50% adverts and I had unread papers piled everywhere they were taking over. The romance of the paper is just that. A thing of fiction, because in reality it is just voluntarily delivered spam.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- alexlitov 15y agoIt's unfortunate that local newspapers' online presence is pretty pathetic. Most of the articles posted resemble amateur blog posts - lacking real journalism, containing grammatical errors that would have been spotted if someone proofread the article before hitting submit. SFgate.com, I am looking at you.
- pagekalisedown 15y ago5 years from now, I have a feeling SFgate.com will be like today's digg.com
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ars 15y agoThis doesn't seem as dramatic to me as others are finding it. The 1950's seem to me like they would be a high point for newspapers (every book and movie set in those years has newspapers quite prominently, and wikipedia says that papers per person peaked in 1950). The years after that look like outliers actually, and now things are simply returning to normal. But to make a true examination I would really like to see a graph going further back (to 1900, and even better to 1850), and I would like to see a graph adjusted per capita (per household, not person).
- EnderMB 15y agoThis often makes me wonder if there is a place in a dying market for a small newspaper that prides itself on world-class journalism and thought-provoking articles. I know it's not exactly comparing apples to apples, but Private Eye in the UK still sells pretty well. I'm sure that if a newspaper marketed itself as high-brow, intellectual and most of all critical of itself and its own standards a lot of people would flock to it, as well as advertisers.
- jacques_chester 15y agoI used to work at a newspaper a few years ago, and in 2009 I posted this: http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/06/02/whats-killing-the-newspaper-it-isnt-bloggers/ http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/06/02/whats-killing-the-newspa... The main source of revenue for newspapers isn't cover prices or even display advertising. It's classifieds. Until the internet came along, your local newspaper had a guaranteed cut of thousands of little transactions every single week. Then craigslist and ebay and real estate websites and car sites and all their ilk proliferated. Now I can, often for free, advertise something small. That sucks the single biggest source of revenue directly out of newspapers. And yes, I'm still working on that startup.
- benohear 15y agoSo if it's neither online nor print, where does the ad spend previously allocated to newspapers now go?
- frankydp 15y agoCheaper non-media online advertising, also the first thing to go in a slow economy budget is advertising. Perfect storm as it were to kill the industry.
- benohear 15y agoDunno. The idea of have of newspaper advertisers are big ticket companies like BMW. I'm struggling a bit to imagine that they've shifted their newspaper budget to Google ads, or that their overall spending has diminuished _that_ much, but I could be wrong on all of these points.
- michael_nielsen 15y agoHere's Marshall McLuhan on this, in 1964: "The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold."