Last week brought another sign that the online medium is continuing to chip away at the hegemony of the offline newspaper industry. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that revenue from auto ads, once a huge part of every newspaper’s advertising revenue stream, has now fallen for seven straight quarters and predicted that “the slippage may be turning into a landslide”.
Last week brought another sign that the online medium is continuing to chip away at the hegemony of the offline newspaper industry. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that revenue from auto ads, once a huge part of every newspaper’s advertising revenue stream, has now fallen for seven straight quarters and predicted that "the slippage may be turning into a landslide".
A lot has been written about the decline in circulation for newspapers, as readers increasingly turn to the Web for their news and information. The silver lining to the drop in offline readers, however, is the huge – and still mostly untapped — opportunity for publishers that transition more aggressively into the online world. As print ad revenues have remained stagnant or dropped for many over recent years, online advertising growth has exploded. For the third quarter of 2005 (the most recent for which statistics have been released), online ad revenue for the newspaper industry hit $518 million dollars, a 27% increase over the same quarter in 2004 (according to the Newspaper Association of America). There’s a lot of good advice about how publishers can better utilize the online medium. Let’s hope they use it.
