Newspaper ad revenues fall to 60-year low:
The decline in newspaper ad revenues to a 60-year low is amazing by itself, but the sharp decline in recent years is pretty stunning. Last year’s ad revenues of about $21 billion were less than half of the $46 billion spent just four years ago in 2007, and less than one-third of the $64 billion spent in 2000.
Whoa, whoa, settle down. Next, you’ll be telling me the sky is blue!
Couldn’t happen to a better bunch.
Interesting note:
20 Billion in 1950 dollars would have the same buying power as 188 billion in 2012 dollars. The decline is sharper than it even appears.
I was a fan of the NP until the Robo Call fake scam I mean CTV and CBC scandal, now I’m boycotting it with the rest of the liberal media.
There is indeed an ongoing decline in advertising revenues, and newspapers are getting the worst of it. However it’s only loosely connected with political partisanship. Most of the reason for the decline is business. Advertisers are looking for targeted markets with a higher rate of returns in sales. Newspapers don’t deliver that. Online advertising and specialty or business trade publications do.
It should also be noted that general advertising expenditures fell starting in 2009 as contracts expired. Decline in advertising has always accompanied recessions, and this one was no exception. It’s an expense that companies can cut quickly, with the trade-off coming in future sales losses.
A second key factor is Classifieds. These used to be a significant proportion of a newspaper’s advertising revenue. It’s fallen off a cliff starting about 10 years ago. Again, the reason is technology and specialty publications. Why pay to advertise your used cars in the newspaper, when you can do it much better to a targeted audience more effectively in a free publication like Auto Trader? Particularly when Auto Trader, like the rest of the specialty publications, has a much longer shelf life than a daily.
cgh, how true! For 30 years I had relied on newspaper ads. It took an employee of mine, in his 60’s to teach me to use KIJIJI. Now we spend next to nothing to reach our target demographic, twentysomethings. I feel very stupid for not having realized this sooner.
Andrew Breitbart dead at 43! What a loss for conservatives!
Sorry, I guess I’m a bit behind the times here. Still a great loss.
cgh…very true…but let us not forget that the scam,outright lies and BS from the MSM does have a very negative effect. That being said,Howie has a great point. I have found that most(not all,of course) people or companies who use Kijiji are honest,as they are small businesses and rely on good reviews and references from the customer.
Would you buy something from an advert in a MSM paper that also is pro commie/facist/socialist/marxist??? Not me.If that advertiser doesn’t give a hoot about how or who- by he sells his product,then he is no better than the media he is using.He definitely doesn’t have your interests at heart!
I am surprised that it is still worth as much as it is. I am sure that most of us here can remember getting the WE paper to look for a job of a car, or putting an add in the paper to sell a car. I think I remember paying 60 dollars for an ad to sell an old car in the Toronto Star ( I don’t read it, but it did have the best classified ads). Think about it, when was the last time you either took out an ad, or bought a paper to to look at the ads? Its probably been 10 years for me.
So left wing newspapers are being replaced by left wing Google. Some things never change.
The hey day of newspapers was only about a century long. Until very recently many of those who worked in that sector assumed that it’s pre-eminence was going to be perpetual. Their level or hubris has made the collapse all the more crushing and bitter for them. And yet the news is better reported today – certainly views from all sides are available when no too long ago they weren’t – than it has ever been.
Like so many extinctions this one will occur largely UN-mourned.
TJ said, “So left wing newspapers are being replaced by left wing Google. Some things never change.”
Perfect!
Fortunately, we still have SmallDeadAnimals.
Justthinkin, there’s a systemic reason for all this. Newspapers have been under heavy pressure for about 30 years. A symptom of this can be seen by just looking at the appearance of the Globe and Mail today compared to 30 years ago. They didn’t call it the Grey Lady for nothing.
One of the principal villains of the piece in the dumbing down of the media has been television. Until television, you had 24 to 48 hour news cycles. Television now meant you had news cycles of just a few hours. So the race was on to get the story in print fastest, not most accurately.
Second, television had another heavily adverse effect on media, appearance. Look at all the eye-candy pretending to be meteorologists on television. Look at all the blonde twenty-somethings pretending to be telejournalists and barely able to articulate a single-syllable, four-word sentence. On TV, appearance matters, and because of that, the print media had to compete. That’s why we have Sunshine Girls. And this drive of appearance over substance has been going on for a very long time. The first North American publication to show this style over substance was USA Today. They invented the notion in North America that a serious news story could be presented in one to two short paragraphs on the front page, and this was back in the late 1970s.
Think about it. At one time, the standard for television commercials was two minutes. Now it’s 15 seconds. At one time, serious thought was a full page op-ed. Now it’s 140 characters on a Tweet. In short, our misuse of technology has been infantilizing the public. And because most of the public are bright enough to know it, they’re turning off mass media in droves.
Third, we’ve had a general push from the Left in academia. During the 1960s and 1970s, that didnt’ matter too much, because the institutionalized Left, the Soviet Union, posed an existential threat to all of us. Post-1990, that’s no longer the case, and the ivory tower types felt much freer to condemn Western institutions than was formerly the case. After all, no one was threatening to drop an atomic bomb on them any more. Twenty years later is just about time enough for this toxic brew of watermelon philosophy to manifest itself in media institutions.
Finally, a series of abuses by government over the past 40 years has respect for government and institutions as never before in our history. After Johnston and Nixon, no one was ever going to take any pronouncement from government without a dumptruck of salt. And young, stupid, ideological reporters have been trying to imitate Woodward and Bernstein ever since.
Oh lookie!!! Baby Bobbie McCl got to stay up late tonight!!! Mommy must be out.
Twit troll.
The Baby said: “This is a thought-free exercise in group think.”
Nope. Its a victory dance. YOU and your little friends are LOSING, and we are winning. Sucks to be you.
Pretty soon most of these friggin’ left wing rags will be bankrupt. When Torstar goes Chapter 11 I’m throwing a party. You’re not invited.
cgh “Third, we’ve had a general push from the Left in academia.”
Exactly. About 1958, a fellow whom I still know, was taking teacher training at McMaster in Hamilton, Ontario and worked summers for my dad. One summer he told us that there had been a communist in his class, whose aim was to teach kids about communism.
In 1981, my mother remarried here in Saskatchewan and one of my new step brothers was a principle in the Lanigan Public School. During one discussion he related the same thing had to him while he was attending the U of S in Saskatoon.
Who only knows how many people were infected by these filthy people.
Forgot to add “same thing had happened to him” in my previous comment.
Newspapers are going broke simply because all the news and related articles are now on the Net. For free. Drudge, Bourque and other sites give the headlines to anything relevant, at your convenience. Most newspapers are now on the net so why pay for something you can get for free? Most papers have adapted to the new reality and the ones that don’t will go out of business.
I agree with everyone’s sentiments regarding the MSM. However, what will we in the blogosphere do without MSM articles to fiske and link?
And those advertising dollars are NOT corrected for inflation, are they?
Peter, go back and read my posts again. The decline in newspaper readership started long before the net was a large factor. It’s merely accelerated it.
No, most newspapers are not adapting to the new reality, as most of them are in varying degrees of trouble. And they are in trouble because of a loss of ad revenue triggered in part by a decline in readership.
What most people don’t understand about newspapers is that cover price is virtually irrelevant to their revenue streams. It covers barely the cost of circulation and nothing else, and it’s been that way for at least 40 years. Take a large metro daily like the Toronto Star. It circulates say 500,000 copies at $1 each. That half million doesn’t even begin to cover the cost of a daily newspaper of that size. Daily newspapers have been giving away hundreds of truckloads of newspapers every day for free across Canada at airports, hotels, etc. And it hasn’t reversed the overall decline in advertising and readership.
There are a handful that are in good shape and growing their market share. Typically these are things like the Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail, or just about anything put out by Rupert Murdoch. They have a particular market strategy to a particular audience that goes beyond any one particular city or town.
The same sort of thing is going on in the television world as well. The big networks are all in trouble. The 500 channel universe is destroying their advertising revenue base, as more and more viewers go off to specialty channels. Again, this has been going on for more than 20 years. The large one-size-fits-all TV networks are in even bigger trouble than much of the newspaper business, and it’s not because of their politics. It’s because their ad base is fracturing to Golf Channel, Space Channel, Discovery Channel, etc. Satellite was doing them in long before the net came along.
It’s always all about advertising.
Mark, yes, they are adjusted for inflation, but newspapers have vastly higher costs adjusted for inflation than they did in the 1950s. That’s why so many of them have gone to zero already.
Danny, the MSM carries a large number of costs that the blogosphere leeches on. Specifically things like news wires and foreign correspondence. As the MSM disintegrates, much of this will be lost.
$16.00 a month I waste on a liberal rag the K-W Record…the things I do to stay married
News editors seem to go out of their way to insult a potential reader and here I am thinking of the two daily papers in Sask. The conservatives have polled strongly here for more than a couple of election cycles but you would never guess that by reading our dailies. To use an example; if the conservatives want to get tough on crime, then our dailies here are for making murder a misdemeanor. It’s a beligerence and an inability to target a potential audience that sometimes astonishes me.
@ nold, that is why I read neither of them. Waste of money.
Im dissapointed in the Liberal direction the NP / Post Media have taken
I am no longer Loyal to the National Post
There’s not as much market for tack and saddles anymore since cars became predominant. There’s still a niche market, but it’s nowhere near as rich a field as it once was. 500+ years from now when an increasing portion of the population is off earth, the need for tack and saddles will be a smaller proportion of the total economy than it is now.
This is what newspapers have faced, but with an additional step or two. Radio news broadcasts cut into their monopoly. Television added the pictures that radio couldn’t replace. Cable TV added room for a diversity of views. The internet has provided direct access whenever the news junkie wants a fix. The newswpapers have chosen a niche that (unfortunately for them) is no longer in the mainstream of news gathering and dissemination.
The focus by newspapers on a particular ideology can combine in the paragraphs above to result in there being a market for non-horse based leather-work, but they’re disdaining the motorcycle wear in favor of the increasingly kinky.
I forgot to give props to cgh, the above was a take-off on your post.
@ Posted by: cgh at March 2, 2012 8:15 AM
You are correct. I should have said accelerated the demise of …….. and it is all about advertisement, much of which has shifted to the Net. I agree with everyone else that much of the problem is lack of investigative reporting as well as taking positions politically rather than staying neutral.
A few years ago, two free daily (Mon-Fri) tabloids showed up in Toronto (and other cities, I understand): Metro and 24 Hrs. They don’t have stories longer than a few paragraphs, but they are convenient to read on the bus or subway. They are available in paperboxes around the city, and there are large piles of each at subway stations.
A few months ago, people started popping up around the busiest subway stations, handing out free copies of the Toronto Sun. For those who don’t know, the Sun’s editorial content is pitched to those with high school educations, but it does boast the best sports section in town and is the paper to turn to if you are looking for a new TV/electronics system or car. I figured that their circulation figures were taking a dive, and they were trying to boost it by enticing people away from the free tabloids.
But today, I was surprised when another group of people was at Finch station, handing out free copies of the Toronto Star. (I had to laugh – as I was buying my subway tokens, someone came up and paid $2.00 (!!!) for a copy of the Red Star, even though people were giving it away not 30 feet behind him. If I were churlish, I might comment on the lack of awareness and perspicacity of Red Star readers, but I’m not, so I won’t..)
I took one, separated the sports section and the page with the bridge/chess problems, Sudoku, etc. and threw the rest into the recycling bin. But still, I was amazed – Canada’s largest circulation daily, forced to give away copies to keep circulation (and advertising guarantees, of course) up. How are the mighty fallen?
Unlike some, I haven’t given up on the NP. It still has the best columnists, diverse letters, OK (not great, but OK) sports, and the best puzzles of any Toronto paper. I especially like lingering over the Saturday edition.
Quick comment on “robo-calls”. First, despite the opposition’s howling, virtually every riding where there are complaints is held by the .. opposition. So allegations that this affected the results of the last election seem pretty ridiculous.
But, regardless, the activity is illegal, immoral, and just wrong. I don’t think the CPC planned or sanctioned or suggested such calls (and I hope, really hope, that we get solid proof that such faith is not misplaced), but geez.. there’s been so many complaints that not having an investigation won’t fly, IMHO. Somebody, somewhere, made these calls – whether it was some rogue idiot, or something more, I’d like to know what was going on. Let Elections Canada do their thing – we all know they hate the CPC, pace in and out, so if EC can’t find anything I’ll be content there was nothing there.
And of course, Bob “The Silver Weasel” Rae’s protestations that we need a Gomery-style inquiry might make one wonder how strongly he demanded the Gomery inquiry when the evidence against the Libs was much stronger than we see in the robo-call kerfluffle. I’d be the first to point out how strenous.. er, how frequent.. er, how strident.. his demands for the in.. oh, never mind.