Ad spending on online editions of newspapers continues to decline
28 Mar 2009
Ad spending on online editions of newspapers continued to fall in Q4 2008, at an increasingly rapid pace in the USA. The Newspaper Association of America reported online advertising was down over 8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.
According to the NAA, online newspapers took in $778 million in Q4 2008, an 8.1 percent decrease from Q4 2007, when online newspaper ad spending hit $846 million. In the fourth quarter of '07, the industry was riding a wave of positive digital advertising growth. In fact, online ad spending on paper sites was up nearly 14 percent that quarter over Q4 2006.
For the full year 2008, the industry took in $3.1 billion in online ad revenues, a decline of 1.8 per cent from 2007. Total print and online ad spending dropped 16.6 per cent to $37.8 billion.
In all, newspaper publishers earned around $10 billion in combined print and online ad revenue in Q4 2008, a drop of almost 20 per cent since the fourth quarter of 2007 when it collected $12.5 billion.
Online ad revenues fell for the first time ever in the second quarter of 2008, dropping 2.4 per cent to $776.6 million.