An interesting article from Gavin O’Reilly in the Independent last week. He argues that far from the death of newsprint the industry is seeing increased circulation and advertising.”These days it is nearly impossible to find a media analyst who actually reads a newspaper or who can see anything other than doom and gloom for the industry.”
He cites circulation not just in India and China, with paid circulation growing globally by 1.9 per cent in 2006, with sales of 510.4 million copies a day. The number of paid-for titles he reports are at a record 11,142, up 3.1 per cent on the previous year. The there is the rapid growth in free dailies - titles such as thelondonpaper, 20 Minutes, Metro and the rest - which together distribute 40.8 million copies a day.
Finally he states that newspapers and magazines are actually the largest advertising medium with a combined 42.3 per cent share of the market.
Interestingly, UK research company TGI, claim that newspaper readership has grown by 2.1 per cent over the past five years, with readership among 15-24 year olds growing by 6.9 per cent and readers over 65 growing by 3.7 per cent.
The key to media exposure he states is the time that people spend reading, watching, using or listening to that particular medium. US private equity fund Veronis Suhler Stevenson, claim that for every hour of TV viewing, advertisers spend $40.1m (£20.2m). For each hour of radio they outlay $19.3m (£9.7m) and for the internet advertisers only spend $65.4m (£33m).
Interestingly, newspaper advertisers spend $316.3m (£160m) for every hour of reading, eight times more than TV. He claims that this reflects the quality demographic that a newspaper delivers.
What is clear is that there is no silver advertising bullet. No one media that kills all others. What we can see is that advertising is getting supposedly smarter and starting to target consumers based on know likes and dislikes and it is inevitable that the internet has the relationship and technology to do this best. However, cost and audibility are key and no advertiser will choose only one channel to their campaign and therefore as the search engines hover up new players they must also get into all channels.
