The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.
According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
I wouldn’t want to be running a real print business at the moment, scary. Full story here.
This is quite interesting to me for many reasons. But one is that I want some of our projects here to expand into online editorial content as well - content that in some cases would compete with some established, and declining, print magazines.
In some other post, I will outline an example with one of these smaller outfits to whom I am trying to make an offer to collaborate. They have an offline Smooth Jazz mag, we have the top Smooth Jazz online radio. Right now the offer is to work together so both benefit while print is declining.
Though if they don’t take the offer on, which seems like they are just ignoring me for me (they have their email @aol.com, if that tells you anything) - I don’t think they realize we have plans to launch a web version of the mag and speed up their offline decline.
A note on this(not necessarily interesting): I have a family member who’s an engineering manager at one of the world’s most efficient paper mills. After talking to him, I found the company has seen significantly declining revenue over the past 5 years and predicts that in the next five years, it’s sales to offline media outlets will be less than half of what it is now. The company hasn’t turned a profit the last few years.