Can newspaper publishers survive this revenue freefall? Perhaps.
A better way to look at the historical revenue record is to place it in the context of total advertising expenditures across all U.S. media. I”ve done that, and here”s what it looks like:
(Click here to see a larger version of this chart.)
That ever-declining line of dark blue diamonds is the newspaper share of total advertising expenditures. In other words, with very few plateaus or upticks, newspaper share of market dropped steadily since 1949 (and even earlier – the peak was actually in 1933 with a share of close to 50 percent), and in the last few years the steady decline has become a precipitous one.
This graph is updated through 2008 (see note at end of post for data sources). The newspaper data is print only - newspaper online revenue is included in the rising light-blue internet revenue line.more