Newspaper Death Spiral Continues

Back in late November TechCrunch ran a story on the continuation of the newspaper industry “death spiral” noting that industry advertising had been down for 10 straight quarters with over a $5 billion shrink occuring in the first 3 quarters of 2008. 

Whilst the numbers for the 4Q08 haven’t been released yet by the NAA it is fairly safe to assume they are not going to paint a pretty picture. 

In Asia however, it is a slightly different story, with print advertising continuing to grow quarter on quarter up until now. 1Q09 is expected to be flat but whether or not this will mark a turning point in the growth of print media in this region has yet to be seen. It is often considered that Asian news and media companies are a good 4 to 5 years behind the trends displayed in the US and Europe, which is certainly true in an online sense. 

3 months ago I wouldn’t have been all that surprised to see print advertising in Asia rebound, but with the deepening economic crisis globally it will be extremely hard for marketers to continue to invest in essentially unmeasurable print campaigns. This marks an opportunity for early adopters in the Asian region to take an initiative and through education of marketers use this as an opportunity to seize additional revenue and market share online. 

Only time will tell, but my recommendation to my Asian clients is to start thinking about strategies to educate your marketing clients and convince them to look at investing a larger percentage of their budgets this year into online properties.


 
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  • http://daus.trala.la/ Daus

    Do you personally think that newspaper will really vanish?

  • http://andrewduck.name Andrew

    No I don’t think that newspaper will disappear, not through any conscious effort to replace it. I along with a lot of other people still prefer to read hard copy printed materials over screen editions, but the digital copy does have a number of benefits that can’t be achieved in print. Twitter is a great example of delivering news instantly as it happens – something that can never be possible with print.

    If print newspapers were to stop printing I think it would only be due to economic reasons – if it ends up non profitable then businesses need to consider whether it is wise to continue down that path.

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