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Newspapers Roiled by Declining Ad Revenue
Newspaper ad revenue suffered a sharp drop in February, with some leading U.S. publications showing double-digit declines compared to February of last year.
USA Today, the country’s highest-circulation newspaper, had a 14 percent drop in ad sales in February compared to February 2006. At the New York Times, ad revenue fell 7.5 percent. The Wall Street Journal was off 10 percent.
The Tribune Company, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun, reported a drop of more than 5 percent, as did McClatchy, whose papers include the Miami Herald and Sacramento Bee.
Collectively, February ad sales were "the worst group performance to date,” said Steven Barlow, an analyst at Prudential Equity Group.
Mark Fratrik, an economist at BIA Financial Network, told the New York Times: "The younger groups, the most desired demographics, are just not reading [newspapers].”
Story Continues Below Newspaper circulation peaked in 1984 at 63 million, but today stands at 53 million.
Analysts said the decline in ad revenue was due in large part to the shift of classified ads from print to online, and to the weakness of the real estate market in several areas, the Times reported.
Revenue from real estate ads in Tampa, for example, dropped 44 percent in February compared to last year. Overall real estate classified ad revenue in California was down 20 percent in February. There was one piece of good news for the newspaper industry – ad spending on newspaper Web sites rose 31.5 percent last year compared to the year before, to $2.7 billion. But that’s still small potatoes compared to last year’s $22.2 billion in print ad revenue.
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
Editor's note:
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