Ken Doctor reporting:
Face it, print advertising is becoming a niche, even if it’s a big one. Through the end of last year, newspapers’ print ad revenues were down 60 percent since the height of 2005, to $18.9 billion from $47.4 billion in the U.S. That’s almost a $30 billion difference in seven years. This year’s decline should roughly match last year’s of 9 percent, and many publishers project about the same loss for 2014. If those numbers hold, that means by the end of 2015, print ad revenues will total $15.6 billion — only around $4 billion more than where reader revenues may then come in.

The continued decline of print advertising is the very dark cloud hanging over the news industry and the darkening ones looming over the magazine industry. While digital advertising overtook print advertising in 2012 in the U.S. and globally, the accelerated pace of the print to digital movement is clear and fairly unwavering.

The test for 2014: How can publishers mitigate their print losses, pulling from an expanding toolbox of sponsored sections, events packages, custom publishing, and more to minimize as much as possible a near-universal negative number?
Digital advertising separates the pack
Last year, U.S. newspapers were up 4 percent in digital advertising, to a total of 11 percent of revenue. This year’s reports indicate that growth could well be less, closer to flattish, with many publishers struggling near the zero point. Yet some, which we’ll investigate in early 2014, are in double-digits. That’s a combination of executing on some of the ad buzzwords of the time — content marketing, native ads — but also on much less glamorous and written-about work like audience extension and yield optimization.

The test for 2014: With print ads spiraling downward, will the failure to execute on a strong and diversified digital ad strategy doom news organizations to even deeper cuts in staff and product?
...Mobility, mobility, mobility
There’s simply no way to over-emphasize the centrality of getting smartphone and tablet experiences right for news customers. This year, we’ve seen newspaper access move from around 25 to 35 percent mobile access, with TV stations in a similar range. Startup news sites, significantly, report 50 percent or more of their views coming from mobile. As importantly, mobile advertising in the U.S. will double to $9.6 billion from $4.4 billion. Google will take about half of that, Facebook 15 percent, with only a couple of dozen publishers are taking in serious money.

The test for 2014: If news publishers don’t make 2014 the year of mobile-first content and sales development, they have slim hopes of growing digital ad revenue over the next several years.
http://newsonomics.com/the-newsonomics-of-how-the-news-industry-will-be-tested-in-2014/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Newsonomics+%28Newsonomics%29