Newspaper Ad Revenue Continues to Fall

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If you’re involved in retail advertising you have to be interested in how newspapers are doing.   Not very well according to this chart from MarketingCharts.com

Here is what the article reports,

US newspaper advertising expenditures continue to decline, according to the latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). In Q2, total expenditures stood at $5.61 billion, down 6.4% from roughly $6 billion a year earlier. Online revenues grew by 2.9%, to $826.7 million, representing 15% share of overall revenues. Print revenues dropped by 7.85% year-over-year to $4.8 billion. The overall 6.4% drop year-over-year in Q2 follows a 6.9% drop in Q1, but this year’s Q2 drop is the smallest year-over-year fall for any quarter since Q2 2010 (-5.55%).

Print ad expenditure decline was most pronounced in national ad sales, which dropped 9.73% year-over-year to $889 million. Classifieds revenue fell 8.39% year-over-year to $1.14 billion, though that was a smaller drop than the 9.85% year-over-year decline from Q1. Retail spending, which represents the majority of expenditures, saw a comparatively smaller decline of 7%, down to $2.75 billion.

The only good news here is that even with the declines there is still a lot of revenue coming into newspapers and there is an increase in digital ad revenue.

The question is, through your ad builder should you be encouraging your retailers to run print ads in newspapers or should you be leading them away from print towards digital.  The answer is that you should continue to be helping them with print, even those these numbers are down there are still a lot of valuable customers reading printed newspapers and plenty of smart advertisers continue to  run ads.  However, you should also be helping your retailers move to digital where consumers are doing most of their product research today and where the cost of the media is very low, if not zero.

 

 

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