Advertising

Just in case the Ambien you were prescribed is working now and you’re finally getting some sleep instead of worrying about all the new challenges facing our business…let’s look at one more and find out how effective the Ambien really is. Here’s a quote from the beginning of this article: “If local newspaper, yellow pages, radio or local TV companies thought that Google, Yahoo, eBay and craigslist were disruptive, they are now going to face down a competitor that will have an even bigger impact on their businesses than any one of those companies did.” That competitor is the location-based marketing made possible by mobile phones. Articles like this one predict the impact on urban and suburban markets more than rural ones, but we all know that urban phenomena soon spread to smaller cities and towns. This is one we’ll have to keep tabs on.

Well, Chicken Little, the sky could indeed be falling. So reports Alan Mutter in his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog. Mutter is reporting NAA figures that actually passed along the “good news” that newspaper sales were off 23.7 percent in the final quarter of the year. That’s the good news? It is when you consider the fact that sales were off 28.3 percent in the first quarter, 29 percent in the second, and 29.9 percent in the third. So 23.7 percent is looking pretty good now, huh? Mutter says: “If the rate of decay continues to slow in 2010, the industry will shrink at a slower pace than it did last year. But it still will continue to shrink. And declining shrinkage should not be taken as a sign of health.”

A new National Newspaper Association survey has yielded some results that will be useful for advertising salespeople who are selling the value of a community newspaper ad buy. Here are the stats you will want to pass along to your salespeople:
- On average, readers share their paper with 2.36 additional readers.
- Nearly 40 percent keep their community newspaper more than a week.
- Three-quarters of readers read local news "often to very often" in their community newspaper.
- Among those going online for local news, 63 percent found it on the local newspaper's website, compared to 17 percent for sites such as Yahoo, MSN or Google, and 12 percent from the website of a local television station.
- 60 percent read local education news "somewhat to very often" in their newspaper, while 65 percent never read local education news online.
- And finally, something to brighten the day of everyone in your ad department: 47 percent say there are days they read the newspaper as much for the ads as for the news.
And in other survey news, community newspapers experienced a slight decline in circulation volume in the second quarter of this year compared to the first quarter, down about 2 percent as a group, according to the latest audit data from Circulation Verification Council.
The CVC survey said 45 percent of community newspaper publishers reported that circulation increased, with the heaviest declines in the Southeast.

Fitz & Jen point to a Borrell Associates report that indicates advertising revenue might finally be on the rise. The best part for community newspapers is that the report expects "much of the upcoming growth to come from community and suburban papers."

Compared to the first quarter of 2008, advertising spending is down 12 percent, according to Nielsen. That's a decrease of $3.8 billion, the company reported today. Local newspapers are down 14.3 percent, according to the company's findings.

Statistics just posted on the NAA website show that print ad sales were down 27.9 percent in the first quarter of this year. Online sales fell 13.4 percent.
But the worse news was what happened to classifieds, where sales fell an astounding 42.3 percent.
Newspaper ad sales for last year were off by 16.6 percent, which the NAA said was the worse 12 months in the recorded history of the industry.