I saw this morning that the Newspaper Association of America released the 2008 figures for advertising revenues. Here is the news:
- Total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6 percent in 2008 over the previous year to 37.8 billion dollars.
- Print advertising revenue fell 17.7 percent to 34.7 billion dollars while online advertising revenue dropped 1.8 percent to 3.1 billion dollars.
- Classified advertising revenue continued to plunge falling 29.7 percent to 9.97 billion dollars in 2008.
- Real estate classified spend fell 38% to 2.5 billion dollars.
(More charts below.)
Many people have been asking where the newspaper advertising dollars are going? Scott Karp has a great post on this using the recent closure of the print edition of the Seattle PI as an experiment. He says:
Logically, one or a combination of the following will happen to the newspaper’s advertising dollars:
- Vaporizes, i.e. the advertiser stops spending the money — given the economic crisis, this seems likely for some advertisers
- Shifts to Seattlepi.com — which is hiring its own sales force following the dissolution of the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times
- Shifts to another newspaper, i.e. Seattle Times — through the JOA, the same sales force sold ads for Seattle PI and Seattle Times, so it only makes sense that some advertisers will shift some or all of their spending to the Times
- Shifts to competing local online media, e.g. The Stranger, West Seattle Blog
- Shifts to non-local media that can target local audiences, e.g. Google, Craigslist (inc. Trulia.com)
What do you think will happen?
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March 28th, 2009 at 7:08 am
Speaking specifically from an agent’s perspective, the newspaper advertising is a dinosaur. My spending is being reduced in this slow economy and print media (both newspaper AND magazine) has been reduced or eliminated. The time I used to spend on development of print ads is now being invested in the internet with more advertising spots such as Trulia, Zillow, Craigslist, and YouTube.
March 30th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
I own a small newspaper classified placement agency. I have found that though smaller community papers and free weekly community papers sales are somewhat steady, the metropolitan dailies are indeed down. The economy has of course effected all publications, but I believe the main reason why their sales are down at a greater percentage than smaller communities is due to their inflated rates for forced online advertising buys.
Since the metro papers have embraced the internet, as they should, most major dailies have contracted with Hot Jobs or Career Builder and their recruitment advertisers are being forced into a combo buy that includes both their print product AND the online posting. The rates are many times $200 or more over what they would be for the print product alone! Smaller businesses cannot afford this and walk away from advertising with them altogether. A simple opt-out option for these advertisers would allow them to still do business with the newspapers, but the publications almost never offer this.
April 3rd, 2009 at 3:35 am
It looks like Trulia has a chance to get a lot of ad Revenue from people that are switching to internet advertising. It also seems that internet ad dollars are lower than comapred to prin, result nowhere to go but up.