24/04/05
The Economist also refers to Murdochs statement. And though being part of the traditional media, it objectively admits that the media need to rethink their future profile.

22/04/05:
Marketing Vox has a short article on this matter: the decline of classifieds in the papers will decrease by 20% by 2007.

And Adrants announces a study by Forrester and Headlight Vision, which will be released today. It states that through multitasking of users, the internet doesn’t lead to a decrease in consumption of other media. But as adrants says correctly: the attention of the user will be divided and the impact of say, advertising will go down nevertheless.

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Checking my feeds and a few (online) newspapers lately, I noticed that there are quite a few articles about the fall of traditional media, especially the paper newspapers.

It’s a long post, but a (hopefully) good summary of latest writings on this matter.

The Long Tail started me off, with a short summary on negative media trends offline (TV, newspapers, Music, Radio, Magazines and Books – and positive media trends (movies: theatres and DVDs, and of course my favourite: the web).
(via )

The longtail links to an article by Editor&Publisher, which summarises slow or decreasing ad spent. Even though some companies might face increases, the trend is negative, only online contributes in some cases and should have an overall double digit growth, but it still makes only 3-5% of the revenues.

The longtail also linked to clickz, with a very enthusiastic forecast, which predicts a 30% growth this year, however online advertising will still only be 5.3% of all ad spending. „The Web sites of traditional media companies will be big beneficiaries of this growth,“ Myers said in that article. (He also goes on about which elements of online marketing will have most growth potential.

The AdAge.com Email Newsletter had this headline: „IS THE AD INDUSTRY HEADED FOR CHAOS?“ It teases a long article in the print edition that stats that the ad industry is moving towards choas. OK, no panic. But apparently it’s about the changes to mass advertising. Traditional media will be less interesting for marketers, but the new media aren’t ready yet to carry the load of marketers spending, due to lack of infrastructur or scale. Unfortunately, I can’t get this paper here in Germany…

PR Opinions is tired of „the new sweeping away the old“ and points to this article, which discusses podcasting (vs radio) and video wars (e.g. google’s new tool), and states that the „big media“ are indeed necessary, because bloggers

get into arguments with each other and spend a few weeks in personal blog battles. They get tired of not making any money at their altruistic pursuits. They get fed up with all the constant negative feedback (which we sometimes refer to as the „peer-review“ system intended to keep blogs honest) and they quit.

But this is not the point. And I don’t know why PR Opinions linked to this (even though it’s a nice read), but it’s about digital vs paper – not who does it and how they do it. And PR Opinions even says it:

But they are going to have to examine their business and start to think about how they can take advantage of the potential of the Internet – not the threats. They have a fantasic opportunity to merge the online and offline worlds.

But they also link to this article, in which it says the following:

Murdoch stressed that young people are showing they do not want to read print papers in the same way their parents do and are not likely to change.
He said young people „still want news and we are uniquely positioned to deliver that news. We have unique content to differentiate ourselves. The challenge, however, is to deliver that news in the way consumers want to receive it.“
„the threat of losing print advertising dollars to Internet advertising is very real; in fact it is already happening.“

ADJAB says, that in future, the papers will have to charge you next to nothing for classified ads, so that you still advertise in the papers. And it pointed to Newspaper&Technology who deepen in on this. But hey. Classifieds? Searching for an appartment, a car or a new stereo? Hello? This is exactly what the internet is good for: Searching.
Classified ads make made up a lot of revenue for the papers, but sorry for the darwinism: the papers will never re-gain this part of the revenue. And two thirds or more are coming from ad revenue – classifieds and big ads.

The traditional media, especially print, need to find an added value. The German site Spiegel.de (which does very well with its online version of it’s weekly publication) mentions how the papers try different formats (so you can read them properly in the subway), or even publishers who will use their distribution network to compete against the post service.

The editors of the offline press do not need to worry, as long as they start investing more in their online presence.
And Marketers – well, just the same…

Shift from offline to online will not be extremely dramatic in the next few years, as there are still enough people who fancy ink on their fingers and paper-cut injuries.
But the shift is becoming extremely visible, and it will cause the first casualties amongst the traditional press soon.

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PS: „Just came in“ aka just found it: a positive Article from Editor&Publisher which shows that there can be good money earned through online ads for online publications.