The decline of newspaper advertising
March 20th, 2013 at 3:00 pm by David Farrar
This graph from The Atlantic tells a powerful story.
Print advertising is dying (but more slowly than a few years ago) but it is not being replaced by online advertising.
This is partly I think because of online alternatives to advertising such as auction sites, social media pages and free sites such as Craig’s List.
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March 20th, 2013 at 3:33 pm
I think it says it all that if the NY Times goes belly up, half a nation will drink a bottle of champaign. Same here for the NZ Herald.
Vote:March 20th, 2013 at 4:08 pm
The audience just isn’t there – circulation is reduced, some of the most desirable consumers to market to just aren’t using that platform anymore. Same applies to Television to an extent. I am in a desirable age and income demographic for advertisers, but it’s been years since I bought a newpaper and months since I watched a program live on TV with ads.
Just look at the marketing department of any large company. Over the last few years or so they’ve cut print advertising but grown digital (which includes the organisation as a content provider as well via enewsletters, website content etc – not just pushing ads to websites) and most big organisations have at least a couple of people dedicated to social media on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc.
It’s the global conversation that was heralded in the Cluetrain Manifesto over a decade ago (http://www.cluetrain.com/) people don’t want to just be passive consumers of sanitised marketing messages – the best organisations are accepting that and working with it.
Mobile is the engagement space for the next decade as smartphones and tablets reach market saturation and become the primary method most people use to access content. The scope for old style advertising in that space is even less.
Vote:March 20th, 2013 at 5:46 pm
And the most telling para from The Atlantic’s story explains why mainstream journalism has gone to the pot:
Vote:March 20th, 2013 at 6:47 pm
This is partly I think because of online alternatives to advertising such as auction sites, social media pages and free sites such as Craig’s List.
The “river of gold” was the classified ads. Some guy on the radio talking about the Melbourne Age said a month or so ago that the Saturday classifieds for that paper were sufficient that they could print Monday-Friday with no ads at all and still make a profit.
TradeMe etc has taken that, as you say. However the other ads – the quarter/half-page/full page ads are trivial by comparison to that revenue and this is why that red line is so gradual since that is what is now advertised on online sites like, as you say, Craig’s List and YouTube. But the lion’s share is as I said, with the classified, and TradeMe etc has disappeared that. That’s why Kirk paid so much for it when Fairfax bought it.
But the growth path for online sites is not to sell eyeballs to corporate advertisers like AirNZ, it’s to grow the services they offer. For example, if YouTube offers a real-estate channel linked with the TradeMe house, that would be an instant winner because who wouldn’t play a video of a walkthrough of a house that’s for sale on TradeMe?
Vote:March 20th, 2013 at 7:05 pm
Does YouTube charge subscribers for anything?
Anyway, I have noticed that online articles from overseas newspapers usually seem a lot better than the once over lightly regurgitated press release stuff we get here in NZ!
Vote:March 20th, 2013 at 7:30 pm
More here: http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/overview-5/key-findings/#economics
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