By Mark Hanzlik, AWN Executive Director
I’m never sure how to take the numbers from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). By way of News & Tech last week, we discover the NAA reported newspapers sold more than $6 billion in print and online advertising during Q3, a 5.3 percent drop from the year prior. According to NAA, the decline in advertising continues to slow, continuing a somewhat unremarkable trend that began earlier in the year. Maybe it’s because the year (2009) was worse than any previous year since they began keeping track of such things.
Realistically, it’s the 17th consecutive three-month period in which advertising revenues declined. Even with the inclusion of online advertising which has been growing, how, really is that good news?
The NAA points to the economic recovery in the U.S. and newspapers’ multi-platform earnings in which they’re heralding healthy online revenue growth. True, this year has seen some bright spots, and there’s definitely some skid marks beginning to indicate a decline in the free-fall numbers from the previous year.
I’m not the kind of guy who often views the glass half-empty but I know that there’s a number of ways you can interpret numbers over the short run and long haul. I’m for viewing the big picture which in my opinion does not yield much of a healthy story for newspapers.
View the numbers at the NAA web site both quarterly and annual reports, make your own story.
The loss of lineage in dailies has only a certain relativity to our business. In some ways, it may help us as certain advertisers (car dealers for one) are now looking for alternatives (sorry for the pun but it’s true) to the daily.
The fact that their online revenue has effectively grown to be 15-20 of their retial dollar volume is helping to stabalize dailies. But our online numbers are still far below the dailies in both readership and revenue.
Still – there’s an opportunity there as they have one site vs. our one site.
WE CAN DO MORE in that regard.
We can always do more!
The online revenue story gives the big publishers something to talk about when they’re facing puzzled investors.