While 45.4 billion bucks may sound like a lot of money, newspaper revenues haven’t been below that since 2003, the year before the fast-growing online component was added to the total. Print-only revenues of 42.2 million were back to levels last seen in 1997.
Classified suffered the worst fall in 2007, down 16.5% to 14.19 billion. National was down 6.7% to 7.0 billion and retail fell 5% to 21.0 billion. The only up category was online, gaining 18.8% to 3.17 billion.
RBR/TVBR observation: It is a painful transition. Those classified dollars are never coming back. Newspapers are claiming some of those revenues online, but they have lots of new competitors – not to mention freebie sites like Craigslist. The annual revenue announcement from NAA emphasized the online jump of nearly 19%. However, the revenues there are still small compared to the decline in traditional business.
