2007 Sees Big Shift From Print and TV Ads to Internet
More bad news for the newspaper industry: 2007 saw the biggest decline yet in advertising revenues for the nation’s top newspapers. The year saw an 8% drop in revenues, and 2008 is forecast to be even worse.
The Internet, however, saw a gain in ad revenue of 33%, which roughly correlates to the lost revenue in other sectors. Print’s loss is the web’s gain.
To make matters worse for newspapers, a very poor housing market in states like Florida and California are leading to big hits in classified ad revenues. Additionally, with free classified services like Craigslist increasing in popularity, one of the biggest money-spinners for newspapers is quickly going south. Hearst estimates The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a day at this point.
Not all the news is bad for print: magazines reported a modest surge in ad revenue over 2007. One would expect all print media to be in decline, but magazine ad buys are still nearly three times that of Internet advertising, and increased by around 3% in 2007. Magazines have an advantage over newspapers in one respect: they can specialize their content more and aren’t forced to put out such a high volume every single day. Choosing specific stories for print and keeping up a consistent website with frequent, unique content is proving a successful model for a lot of magazines.
The newspapers do pump out a lot of very good content, however, and Internet revenues for newspapers are climbing quite consistently, usually around 30% a year over this decade. Internet marketers, in deciding what content they want to associate themselves with, may find traditional newspaper websites most conducive to the message they want to put out. Nothing on the web can compete with the content of, say, the New York Times.
At this point, Internet revenues make up only about 10% of ad revenues for newspapers, and the gains being made are not nearly enough to offset the decline in print ads.
One thing is for sure: all of this is very good news for the Internet. Around $1 billion moved from print and TV directly to the web last year, and those numbers aren’t changing any time soon. There’s plenty of room for catching up as well, with the Internet still lagging behind other media quite significantly for total market share.
Life is good for Internet marketing, and it’s only getting better.
Story via Richard Perez-Pena of The New York Times.
Technorati Tags: internet advertising, internet marketing, newspaper advertising
