Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Once you adjust for inflation, that is — as Alan Mutter explains:

Newspaper Ads Tank Again, Industry Shrinking Fast

If you subtract this year’s likely $42.7 billion in print-ad revenues from the constant-dollar value of the sales a decade ago, the difference of approximately $10 billion means that today’s revenues are nearly 20% lower than they were in 1997. On a constant-dollar basis, therefore, industry sales this year will be about one-fifth lower than they were in 1997.

. . . 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. Further, sales have been diving at an increasingly accelerated rate since 2004. . . .

Seemingly dumbfounded by the arrival of serious competition for their audiences and advertising revenues, newspapers have been struggling for more than a decade, with meager success, to regain their relevance and economic vitality.

Be sure to check out Mutter’s chart.  Ouch.