According to the last episode of “The X-Files,” the world will end in 2012. That’s not far off. But for the newspaper ad industry, a sort of Armageddon may come even sooner – a new report indicates that online advertising will surpass its print counterpart in 2011.
Sure, sure – “the end is near” has been a popular slogan for centuries. Yet Aline van Duyn of the Financial Times notes, “The findings are from a widely-watched annual research report on the media sector by Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS).”
van Duyn then continues, “In the 2007 study, published on Tuesday, VSS forecasts that online advertising will grow by more than 21 per cent per year to reach $62bn in 2011, making it bigger than newspaper advertising, which is expected to total $60bn in 2011.” Those numbers, by the way, apply only to the U.S.
And with that factor taken into account, the predictions don’t seem too unreasonable. Furthermore, as 24/7 Wall St.’s Douglas A. McIntyre points out, “If the internet does indeed keep up such a rapid revenue growth rate and newspapers continue their decline, it is possible that local papers will not be viable businesses by the middle of the next decade.”
Although we’ve all seen how even “the best laid plans of mice” can turn out (to refer to another end-of-the-world-scenario), it looks like the newspaper advertising industry is going to have “fight the future.”
