The editor of Wired magazine believes in the future of newspapers.
Welcome to the newspaper optimists club!
He reprints a chart from Gawker that:
Shows US newspaper advertising revenue from 1982 to last year, with the dark brown print revenues and the light brown online.
It was headlined “Over the precipice”, and the same news (of a 9.4% fall in print ad revenue and a 7.9% fall overall, including online) elsewhere got similarly apocalyptic coverage about the largest fall in fifty years.
But when you see this chart, what’s the first thing that you notice?
Surprisingly, the industry is just ten percent off its historic highs (much like the stock market) and is still twice as big as it was twenty years ago.
If you’d ask me to describe the state of the newspaper industry based on the scary coverage about it alone, I would have guessed that it had fallen by half and that we were back to 1970s levels.
Instead, it’s a $45 billion business, which is twice as big as Google and Yahoo combined.
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