Newspaper Ad Revenues Fall to 50-Year Low in 2011

[frankydp]

I 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.

[pg]

Not entirely fiction. Newspapers used to have fewer ads.

[pg]

That is a really dramatic graph. It's hard to imagine an industry coming back from something like that.

[brandnewlow]

Thankfully, "newspapers" != "journalism".

[esun]

The 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.

[Cushman]

Was 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.)

[nodata]

So, 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?

[michael_nielsen]

Here'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."

[ars]

This 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).

[DevX101]

I 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.

[alexlitov]

It'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]

5 years from now, I have a feeling SFgate.com will be like today's digg.com

[EnderMB]

This 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.

[cchooper]

The Economist and Financial Times are both modern success stories for selling on-line subscriptions, so your theory holds out in practice.

[jacques_chester]

I 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-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]

So if it's neither online nor print, where does the ad spend previously allocated to newspapers now go?

[frankydp]

Cheaper 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.

[MrGrey]

Bye bye. You won't be missed.