Pretty amazing. The thing that goes hand-in-hand with ads, of course, is content. And I think that's the other place where papers failed to evolve. I worked for one amazing editor in the early 1990s who "got it." I was a business writer at the time, but he was able to look outside the box to stories other business newspaper sections never touched. He was always asking "how does this business or business decison affect people's lives" much like we try to do on IU. But too many editors just kept delivering the same tired stuff. And people stopped reading.
Crying shame, too, because the large papers with national reputations would have been able to grow their influence if they had embraced the digital format.
The WSJ line shows what I mean in the second figure from the same Atlantic article -
Attribution - This Atlantic article which is on the web, of course.
Help wanted ads are all online now too. Generally, newspapers got their clocked clean by Internet classifieds especially Craigslist.
Real estate advertising was a big chunk of newspaper ad revenue. And around 2000, an executive from the Newspaper Association of America reassured real estate agents and brokers about the future of traditional print ads. "Newspapers are the number one media selection," Anthony Marsella, then vice president of classified advertising for the Washington, DC-based NAA, told a group at the National Association of Realtors convention. "We don't expect that to change in the near future."
But it did, and contrary to Marsella's prediction, newspapers lost their spot as the real estate advertising media of choice.
The change came quicker than almost anyone expected, catching even leading industry analysts by surprise. Williamsburg, VA-based Borrell Associates predicted in 2005 that online real estate ad spending would outpace print classifieds by 2009. In fact, a convergence of technology and the softening housing market caused online ad spending to surge significantly faster -- and digital surpassed print spend by 2006.
Why? Online ads are less expensive than print, and advertisers think the tracking options give them more ways to monitor their ad dollars. At the same time, people started doing more of everything online.
So did a spread of online listing sites, valuation tools, mapping sites and research portals—all of which contributed to a profound shift in the way potential buyers shop for homes.Information on houses and housing trends, once controlled by real estate agents and brokers, became freely available on the Internet.
And print rapidly declined.
The other big chunk of newspaper ads: Help wanted. But with Monster.com and a bunch of other online job search sites, who needs the classifieds? In addition, just as more people shifted to digital, the actual number of jobs declined -- another nail in the print ad coffin.
That's my long winded answer.
My mom worked as a newspaper journalist in the 80's and 90's. From what she saw, I would have expected the decline was much slower and decades longer - like the decline of General Motors.
This data shows ad revenue falling off a cliff in just the last 5-6 years - with the peak year as recently as 2001 or so. Could that be right?
Print is a perfect example of an industry that not only refused to evolve, but tried its best to ignore the dawn of digital. I was working in a print newsroom in the late 1980s, at a time when print could have effectively transitioned to online and maintained its presence. And all I heard from managers were dismissive statements about the Internet -- and a lot of erroneous predictions that it would never be a threat.
I know many here at IU have a media backgournd. Check this out -
Wow - the free-fall continues.
It's from an article published at the Atlantic. Here's the link to the story.
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