Give another point to the “print is dying” crowd; new numbers reveal that, in the third quarter of 2007, online newspaper advertising grew and the traditional type dropped.
What’s more, both movements were significant – there were no measly shifts of one or two percent, here. A whopping 21.1 percent was the amount by which online advertising increased, while offline ad expenditures slowed by 7.4 percent.
To be fair, the state of the American economy doesn’t exactly encourage any sort of ad spending; this might be of some relief to pro-print types. Yet, given the effect of inflation, things might actually be worse than they appear.
“With inflation eliminated from the sales numbers, you can see that the industry’s sales have fallen far more steeply in the last decade than the actual numbers suggest,” writes Alan Mutter. “Further, sales have been diving at an increasingly accelerated rate since 2004.”
Elsewhere in the newspaper industry, Yahoo is still expanding its newspaper consortium, and Rupert Murdoch may make the online version of the Wall Street Journal free. Some major shifts are definitely taking place.
