Google's Chief Economist says newspapers' decline "started well before the web came along. Circulation has been falling since 1985 and circulation per household has been falling since 1947."
He says, "The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day."
Other notes of interest:
35-40% of major U.S. newspaper online revenue is coming from search engine referrals.
The real money in search engine advertising is in the highly commercial verticals like Shopping, Health, and Travel. Unfortunately, most of the search clicks that go to newspapers are in categories like Sports, News & Current Events, and Local, which don’t attract the biggest spending advertisers. This isn't so surprising: the fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news. They’ve made money from the special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink, and so on. Traditionally, the ad revenue from these special sections has been used to cross-subsidize the core news production.
Some have argued that the solution to the financial problems of newspapers is to charge for access... News sources that have highly differentiated content may be able to make pay-for-access work, but this will likely to be difficult for more generic news sources. In my view, the best thing that newspapers can do now is experiment, experiment, experiment.
Read more here.
