Rejoice! US newspaper sales down by only 7%
Here’s a sign of how badly the newspaper industry is doing – some stats from the US. The Newsosaur points us to the latest US daily newspaper sales figures and there’s a marked improvement on previous quarters.
In particular, sales are only down 7-8%, “making it the least bad sales spell since the Autumn of 2007.” As always though the picture isn’t uniform, The New York Times group still saw a drop of 2.3% but the NYT itself recorded an increase of 1.1% (its sister paper the Boston Globe did less badly, showing a sales drop of 9.1%).
According to OECD figures, the US leads the way in the whole death of newspapers trend, with the market contracting by 30% between 2007-2009. However, here in the UK we hold the number two spot when it comes to the incredibly shrinking newspaper market (down 21%).
The ABC figures for the UK dailies published last month show that the quality nationals performed particularly badly, with The Guardian for example showing a 15%+ decrease in paper sales compared to last year.
The UK’s tabloids however seem to be stemming the decline – at least temporarily. Though compared to last year, they all show a fall, on a month by month basis The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Star all showed an increase (the Mirror and Express still recorded slight falls)
Which begs the question, here in the UK at least, is it higher demographic newspaper readers who are abandoning print first, with tabloid readers slowly coming back post recession?
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Yeah, I know. I keep wondering if newspapers will plateau, or continue their fade into nothing. I suspect they’ll be around for at least another 30 years until the older generation passes on, but if tablets fall in price to the $99 range within 5 years, they may fly away sooner. The problem is trying to make advertising work in the dying medium; many marketers still want the same results in terms of cost per inquiry, which is nearly impossible given the diminished audiences.