
From Terrible To Terrifying: Newspaper Ad Sales Plummet $2.6 Billion In Q1 2009 - peter123
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/02/from-terrible-to-terrifying-newspaper-ad-sales-plummet-26-billion-in-first-quarter/
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WilliamLP
Why should this be terrifying and not an example of us outgrowing something
quaint and ridiculous? Printing yesterday's news every night on a ton of
paper, physically delivering it to people, and then having them throw it away
is supposed to be an immortal business model?

~~~
wallflower
"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry,
because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty,
complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has
stopped being a problem." -Clay Shirky

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-
thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-
unthinkable/)

~~~
WilliamLP
> the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do
> whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

What a brilliant article! It's an especially fascinating commentary on how
people can be willing to go to such great lengths to deny a stark but simple
and obvious explanation of what is happening.

------
miles
Great comment from "Wells" posted on techcrunch:

 _"yawn Are we going to keep bemoaning the death of VHS too? What about
8-track? Newspapers are dead. People don’t want them. News is not dead, people
want it. Figure it out."_

Sadly, times have changed. We need to "bail out" any failing business, no
matter how ridiculous:

The Ridiculous Newspaper Bailout Begins [http://www.businessinsider.com/the-
ridiculous-newspaper-bail...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ridiculous-
newspaper-bailout-begins-2009-5)

Imagine our current crop of politicians at the turn of the (20th) century:
"Save the poor horse and buggy! Just think of the crumbling equine economy!"

------
axod
I'd like to see how other advertising as a whole has changed over the same
time period. Without that, I don't think the stat is too useful. Has _all_
advertising dropped off a cliff, or has online advertising taken share away
from newspapers?

~~~
fallentimes
I think it'd be cool to hear some HN anecdotes as well. What's been your
experience with Mibbit?

Although we don't have any advertisements on the main TicketStumbler site,
we've seen the price of tickets, on average, plummet. Some Major League
Baseball tickets are selling 80% below face value.

~~~
axod
Agreed @ anecdotes on here.

In terms of Mibbit, advertising has been extremely stable for the last 6
months (adsense). (In absolute terms it's been growing, along side mibbit).

I used to do a lot more affiliate marketing on another site, but still see a
fair amount of commissions from it, even though it's "dead". I think online
advertising is pretty healthy.

Anyone else have any interesting data/thoughts?

~~~
netsp
A lot of what I do revolves around online advertising. Some things, such as
redesigning sites & the like (which is also really a form of online
advertising) have softened a little.

Things like Adwords have gone sideways: Some reducing spending to cope with
reduced income, some increasing for the same reason. I think slight net
positive.

Client growth is to irregular to know what's going on without looking at years
instead of months.

Put the two together & I read it as deferring bulky expenses, but overall
strengthening slowly. Anyway, the areas we deal in there's a lot of cash still
stuck in legacy budgets: yellow pages, local newspapers& crappy online
advertising. New companies aren't going there at all, but all of them are
going online one way or another.

------
blhack
From Terrible to terrifying: 35mm film sales have plummeted.

Newspapers aren't going to disappear. Specialty newspapers like the financial
times will always have their place on my breakfast table, but the boring,
almost-pointless local news?

Thats going on my kindle in a hurry.

------
jerf
I am having a devil of a time figuring out what that graph actually is. I
_think_ the percentage is "how much less revenues are than the same quarter
last year", but I'm still not 100% on that. It's a very strange number to
graph quarterly, especially without more clearly labeling it.

~~~
anigbrowl
Raw #s at [http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-
Expenditures...](http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-
Expenditures.aspx) \- the meat is that total newspaper ad sales in 2005 were
~50b and now it's ~30b - while some of that is obviously recessionary, many of
those advertisers are never going to come back now that they've discovered the
joys of digital.

As well as it being easier than ever to publish your original content, it's
also become easier than ever to book advertising. The company I work for is
based in old media (TV) and working on strategy in bundling TV ad sales with
radio and print for niche markets but it's not a viable long-term approach - I
do learn interesting things about how the ad biz works, but some days I can't
help hearing the subtext as 'this slide rule will still work when your
calculator batteries have died'.

------
quoderat
Given how superior the internet is in every possible way (search, ease of
updating, ease of distribution, price) for content and for ads, I am amazed
that the decline has taken so long.

My perspective is probably skewed by being an early adopter, though, and the
fact that society always moves far slower than I hope.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Actually, the one area that I think print has an advantage over digital is
tangibility. I love the web and all things digital, but there's still
something special about sitting in a coffee shop and reading a newspaper or
paperback novel, or leisurely paging through an art book. The Kindle is
awesome and I'll give up all my physical books when I get one, but something
real and meaningful will be lost in the transition, I'm afraid. Something
worth losing, but something just the same.

~~~
electromagnetic
I think the reason newspapers have declined so much, is merely the fact that
they rely almost entirely on advertising to pay for the production and it's
fairly inaccurate advertising. I mean your demographic targeting is
exclusively to those who read, which in countries with 99% literacy rates,
you're basically fucked for targeting. Where as you can pay less money to
advertise online, reach less people but potentially have everyone who sees it
interested.

Advertising on a bus is more demographically targeted than newspaper
advertising, I mean generally lower income and likely don't own a vehicle. I
don't own a drivers license, so why do I care about the new Ford Taurus, they
just wasted money by advertising to me.

However, there's no advertising in book sales. Perhaps this is why for the
past ten years they've had record sales. The internet has only helped book
sales, and interestingly free eBook releases also boost sales.

The assumption that publishing is dead because of the internet is just stupid.
We have ubiquitous clean water supplies, but people still "waste" money on
bottled water. Plumbing isn't as useful to people as water in a bottle.
Similarly, eBooks aren't as useful to people as books (at least so far).

Kindle and similar eBook readers offer promise to removing the paperback from
its throne, but tangibility and freedom are key here. I can hand my book to
anyone, I can sell it on and whatever I want, this creates the incredible
ability for free advertising. Most of my books are from authors recommended to
me, which usually involved the person handing me the book to me for me to
read.

Also you can't advertise that you're intelligent and well read better than a
bookshelf full of books. Then there's all the textile sensations that come
with books.

While I don't doubt books will likely go the way of the newspaper. I highly
doubt the end is nigh for bookpublishers when they have record sales. It just
stinks of the BS spouted in the 50's that the end of the automobile would be
soon because of how cheap air travel was becoming. I'm still not flying to
work, so I'll laugh and ridicule the people who tell me book publishers are
going to go out of business when they have record sales, just as everyone
should have doubted we'd be flying to work when automobile manufacturers were
posting record profits and more highways were being built than ever.

It just strikes me as ignorant, that so many tech news websites and the
fanboys on them don't seem to grasp that newspapers and novels are far more
different than Microsoft and Apple. You'd think people who can proclaim two
computers so different would be capable of understanding a newspaper is not a
book, alas apparently not.

------
greyman
To throw different opinion here: I personally like the format of print
newspaper.

\- yes, they are "yesterday" news, but that isn't a problem for me. For most
news, I just don't need to know instantly that they happened.

\- by fliping the pages I can get better overview of what is going on in the
world (comparing to clicking on links).

\- It doesn't have the interaction element. I could better relax with print
newspaper, since my mind don't need to think about adding comments to articles
I read.

All in all, I'd say that I am as geeky as any of you, but for general news, I
have found that print newspaper still provides better user experience for me,
comparing the online news.

------
wensing
I wonder how many of the dollars no longer being spent on these ads are being
captured (as pennies) by Google (and perhaps startups?). I worked at a metro
paper from 07-09, and the 2nd largest local ad seller was Google, with their
local sales force of 0 (1st was the paper, with their sales force in the
scores).

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ars
Is that graph percent decline from a baseline? Year on year decline? Quarter
to quarter?

~~~
asmithmd1
The graph is very steep and getting steeper!!

Seriously it is year over year sales change by quarter graphed as percentage
change.(I guess to make it look more dramatic)

here is the raw data: [http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-
Expenditures...](http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-
Expenditures.aspx)

------
jsz0
I'd rather see the 24 hour cable news networks taking the beating but hey,
gotta start somewhere. We'll all be much better off when journalism and news
are not controlled by a handful of powerful companies with their own agendas
and political biases to consider. A thousand different perspectives averaged
out is pretty close to the truth IMO.

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tybris
Newspapers don't have the outreach of modern media. Modern media don't have
the journalistic quality of newspapers. Solution: Bankrupt newspapers and move
journalists to modern media.

~~~
griftah
"Modern media" don't have money for the quality.

------
zouhair
We live in a World where ads are the only mean to make money for newspaperes,
maybe they better die.

------
helveticaman
This is what you call the steep part of the sigmoidal curve.

------
bdmac97
People still read newspapers?

