

Newspaper Ad Revenues Fall to 50-Year Low in 2011 - evolution
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2012/02/newspaper-ad-revenues-fall-to-50-year.html

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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.

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pg
Not entirely fiction. Newspapers used to have fewer ads.

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frankydp
It is kinda sad that their primary revenue stream has become(imo) their
biggest negative trait.

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

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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.

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roel_v
"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.

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jeremymims
Roel, 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> and
<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?

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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."

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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).

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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cchooper
_The Economist_ and _Financial Times_ are both modern success stories for
selling on-line subscriptions, so your theory holds out in practice.

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frankydp
Can anyone provide some insight about how successful The Economist has been
online?

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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...](http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/06/02/whats-killing-the-newspaper-it-
isnt-bloggers/)

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.

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

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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.

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benohear
Dunno. 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.

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MrGrey
Bye bye. You won't be missed.

