... While it’s easy to blame the Internet for newspapers’ ills, note that overall ad revenue per capita had been stagnant (with exceptions for the broader business cycle) for decades. Newspapers were making roughly the same revenue per capita in 1980 as they were in 1993 or 2001 — all before the precipitous decline of the past few years.
That revenue stagnation happened in a context of real GDP-per-capita growth (see slide 6), which is why the newspaper business’ share of overall advertising revenue in the United States has been declining since at least the 1940s (see slide 5).
— That red online slice doesn’t look to be growing at a rate that’ll comfort the entire industry, does it? Compare DeGusta’s analogous chart for the music industry, where at least the digital-revenue slice seems to be at least adding something substantial to the mix, even as music’s non-digital numbers are tumbling even faster than newspapers’.
NAA’s numbers showed a 10.9 percent increase in online ad revenue from 2009 to 2010. But that means that 2010 online ad revenue was still below 2007 levels.
Or: After a decade of worrying about the Internet, after the collapse of its print advertising base, still only 12 percent of newspaper ad revenue came from online. (And, of course, a much tinier slice of circulation revenue.)
Or, perhaps most galling of all: Even after a decade-plus of eBay and Craigslist and Match.com and the rest, online revenue is barely half as big as classified ad revenue, the one line item most folks gave up for dead years ago.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/slip-and-slide-newspaper-industry-increases-production-of-scary-charts
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