The newspaper industry has seen a 55% drop in sales since 2007 going from $9.8 billion to $5.4 billion this year and owing to a new deal struck by the USPS to mail pre-print ad material, it looks like it will only get worse.
From Newsosaur
Representing some $5.2 billion a year in sales in 2011, advertising inserts from companies like Best Buy, Target, Kohl’s, Home Depot and Kmart represent the second largest revenue stream left to an industry that has lost half of its sales since revenues peaked at $49.4 billion in 2005. The only bigger revenue source for publishers are the local retail ads carried in the pages of their print editions.
The growing importance of the preprint business to newspapers in the last five years is illustrated in the pie charts below, which show that preprints represented 26% of the industry’s $4.4 billion in sales in the first quarter of this year vs. 17% of the industry’s $9.8 billion in revenues in the first three months of 2007.
Preprint advertising has a significant impact on the industry’s profitability. “Preprint advertising accounts for 70% of the Sunday revenues at the average newspaper,” said one industry leader who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak for his organization. With the Sunday paper producing “most of the profitability” for many publishers, he added, the health of the preprint business has a direct bearing on the bottom line of almost every publisher.
[hat tip/David Cay Johnston]
Bull shit Mark, corporate interests killed the news. You exist INSIDE that mentality. I don’t want better corporate bullshit, I don’t care about their gdamned profit margin.
We’re talking about news, which is essential to a free society, which we are losing at the very behest of these corporate titans.
I have NO interest in spending time thinking about how corporate interests can function, I’ve lived it, we see it every day.
YOU stay at that table Mark, the people will find a way to re-establish a system of communicating essential news.
Smirk all you want, this nation is falling apart, and corporate news has been the chief enabler .
LOL
In the long term, news-papers may be doomed, but news is most assuredly not. We have more news at our fingertips now than ever before. Quite probably more people are accessing it than ever before as well. The problem is with the business model. When news is ubiquitous and free, how can the news providers earn a living? There’s a good example right here on MGx. Matt Taibbi’s excellent article about Romney & Bain Capital printed in the Rolling Stone. I hope everyone read it. It’s very good. Did any of those readers PAY for it. I doubt it. How is Mr. Taibbi or the Rolling Stone going to pay its bills in a subscriptionless world? That’s the question media outlets are grappling with for several years now. There are solutions, but they all require paradigm shifts. They also invite an age-old discussion about how much information should cost readers/voters in a democracy. It may be easy to say “Nothing!” but it still has to be paid for. How?
It’s an interesting time to be in the information business. There are a myriad of opportunities for clever thinkers. But it is not accurate to use this unfolding technological development as an indictment on the NYTimes, The Oregonian, or The World. Those entities are caught in a crossfire and they must explore ways to survive in a changing world.
And The World paper will sink even faster with it going to a subscription model for its online content.