4 ms·

Circulation has been steeply dropping Yes and no. 10 years ago, at best I'd buy and read one newspaper per day. Now I probably visit 10 newspapers' websites p

Circulation has been steeply dropping Yes and no. 10 years ago, at best I'd buy and read one newspaper per day. Now I probably visit 10 newspapers' websites per day to read various news. While physical circulation is down, overall exposure may not be.

InclinedPlane 17y ago
Yes, but do you BUY 10 newspapers a day? Hardly. Circulation is a source of revenue (currently a larger source of revenue for papers than online ads). Moreover, buying a physical paper encourages someone to spend more time with it, to read it thoroughly and to have greater exposure to the ads. Even today print ads are more valuable, per eyeball, than online ads. When you visit those 10 newspaper sites a day, how many ads do you click? How many ads do you even read? This is not to say that a paper couldn't survive with only online ad revenue, far from it. The key point is that the operations of those 10 newspapers whose sites you visit are no cheaper today than they were a decade ago. Most importantly, they are not cheap enough to be supported entirely by online ad revenue. And when you take away the print revenue and the circulation revenue, online ads are all that's left. You probably don't read the classified ads, the weather forecasts, the republications of identical national wire reports, or the beetle bailey cartoons at each and every one of those 10 newspapers. Yet each of those papers still puts out all of that material. And that costs money. It costs yet more money to arrange everything for a physical page and print tens or hundreds of thousands of physical copies of the paper every day. Papers could survive if they changed, but they don't want to change. Because if they concentrated on just the tiny fraction of work that they do that isn't redundant or unnecessary in the online world they would be much smaller operations than they are today. Not only that, but, odd as it sounds, not reprinting beetle bailey and all that other crap would cause them to lose a lot of subscribers in the short-term, even though it might be healthier in the long-term. So papers haven't changed much even while their industry has been radically transformed by technology. And most papers won't change much. It's questionable whether there exists a path between the way a given paper exists today and the sort of entity that could exist in the online world, it may be that it's easier to build something else from scratch. This deal with Microsoft is yet one more example of newspapers trying to avoid inevitable changes to their ways of doing business.
- chris100 17y ago
  When you visit those 10 newspaper sites a day, how many ads do you click? And how many ads did I click on when I was reading the paper version of a newspaper or magazine? [One of] The great downfall of newspapers is that now each action can be precisely measured. We know exactly what our instant return on investment is. I was one who looked at our company's advertising budget, looked at the return (number of clicks), and said to cut it in half because we could put that money to better use somewhere else. I know the pain because I had many meetings with editors and people selling ad space in magazines who were desperate to get our advertising budget, to the point where the editor would offer to let us guest write articles... And then a good reason why I stopped reading those magazines in the first place is the poor quality of the articles. No wonder, if they are just repeats of press releases, I don't need to read that.

InclinedPlane 17y ago

Yes, but do you BUY 10 newspapers a day? Hardly. Circulation is a source of revenue (currently a larger source of revenue for papers than online ads). Moreover, buying a physical paper encourages someone to spend more time with it, to read it thoroughly and to have greater exposure to the ads. Even today print ads are more valuable, per eyeball, than online ads. When you visit those 10 newspaper sites a day, how many ads do you click? How many ads do you even read? This is not to say that a paper couldn't survive with only online ad revenue, far from it. The key point is that the operations of those 10 newspapers whose sites you visit are no cheaper today than they were a decade ago. Most importantly, they are not cheap enough to be supported entirely by online ad revenue. And when you take away the print revenue and the circulation revenue, online ads are all that's left. You probably don't read the classified ads, the weather forecasts, the republications of identical national wire reports, or the beetle bailey cartoons at each and every one of those 10 newspapers. Yet each of those papers still puts out all of that material. And that costs money. It costs yet more money to arrange everything for a physical page and print tens or hundreds of thousands of physical copies of the paper every day. Papers could survive if they changed, but they don't want to change. Because if they concentrated on just the tiny fraction of work that they do that isn't redundant or unnecessary in the online world they would be much smaller operations than they are today. Not only that, but, odd as it sounds, not reprinting beetle bailey and all that other crap would cause them to lose a lot of subscribers in the short-term, even though it might be healthier in the long-term. So papers haven't changed much even while their industry has been radically transformed by technology. And most papers won't change much. It's questionable whether there exists a path between the way a given paper exists today and the sort of entity that could exist in the online world, it may be that it's easier to build something else from scratch. This deal with Microsoft is yet one more example of newspapers trying to avoid inevitable changes to their ways of doing business.

chris100 17y ago
When you visit those 10 newspaper sites a day, how many ads do you click? And how many ads did I click on when I was reading the paper version of a newspaper or magazine? [One of] The great downfall of newspapers is that now each action can be precisely measured. We know exactly what our instant return on investment is. I was one who looked at our company's advertising budget, looked at the return (number of clicks), and said to cut it in half because we could put that money to better use somewhere else. I know the pain because I had many meetings with editors and people selling ad space in magazines who were desperate to get our advertising budget, to the point where the editor would offer to let us guest write articles... And then a good reason why I stopped reading those magazines in the first place is the poor quality of the articles. No wonder, if they are just repeats of press releases, I don't need to read that.