Here are a bunch of charts and reports about the newspaper market worth looking at side by side.

On one hand, an OECD report (via a post by Erina Lin in sfnblog) again confirms that in the UK and US the newspaper market is in a steady period of decline.   And on the other hand, an article in AdAge, shows that digital revenues almost certainly aren’t making up the losses.

The OECD shows that between 2007-2009 not a single member country saw an increase in the newspaper market.  Note, that the OECD’s definition of the newspaper market is: “Online and offline circulation and advertising revenues of traditional newspaper publishers” – in other words everything that traditional papers do to make money.

The US (-30% decline) and the UK (-21%) very much led the way, though among English speaking countries, Australia bucked the trend, ‘only’ seeing a 3% fall in the same period.

Here is another chart from the same report showing that while seniors are still most likely to read a paper, the % who regularly read a newspaper in the US has been going down among all age groups.

50% of UK newspaper revenues down to sales
Though the US and UK lead the world in their shrinking newspaper industries, they are affected in different ways.

With 50% of revenue coming from circulations, UK newspapers are more at risk from changing demographics, with younger consumers in particular not being in the habit of buying a morning paper.   With 87% of revenue coming from advertising, US publishers have by comparison been hit harder by the general economic downturn.

US Newspapers now only have 30% of the digital advertising pie
However, circulations and ad revenues are clearly linked, and here is the bad news.

From the AdAge article, ‘Mounting Web Woes Pummel Newspapers’, US Newspapers are not succeeding in getting a decent share of the whole digital advertising pie.   Even as digital advertising as a whole increases in value, US papers’ share of the total has gone down to around 30%.

In fact, writing on Australian Marketing website Mumbrella over a year ago, journalism professor Stephen Quinn pointed out that while classified advertising used to represent 40% of newspaper profits back in 2000, thanks to the likes of Gumtree and Craigslist, that total had gone down to 23%.

More tellingly, Professor Quinn said that when looking at the New York Times, its online advertising revenues would only pay for a fifth of its news gathering budget.

Before we start writing off newspapers completely though, there are another set of figures from the OECD report worth looking at.  While the OECD countries saw their newspaper markets decline, when you look at emerging markets such as South Africa, India, China and Brazil, a completely different picture emerges.

While circulations in OECD countries went down year by year from 2003-2008 in the so-called BIICS (Brazil, India, Indonesia, China, South Africa) they steadily went up.    To take India as just one example, the % that regularly reads a newspaper went up from 17% in 2003 to 37% in 2008.

As a result, worldwide – certainly outside of the minority of countries where Internet penetration is 50% – the newspaper industry is actually a growth industry.

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• Honesty in the age of the paywall (charman-anderson.com)
• Report: Online Ad Revenue Will Soon Surpass Print (readwriteweb.com)

Late last year there were stats coming out of the US implying that Twitter’s growth was stalling.   Not so says analyst firm Sysomos, which has come out with a report showing what’s gone on for the first quarter of 2010.

Sysomos estimates that March will see 1,477 million tweets being made, compared to 928 million in December 2009.   Number of tweets per day also passed 50 million+ in February.

A lot of that growth however comes from outside the US.   Sysomos has previously posted research showing that the social network as a whole was becoming steadily less US-focused and anglophone.  Back in January, US users were just above half of the total – 50.88% – compared to 62% in June 2009.

Given that non US growth over the quarter has consistently been higher than US growth (see chart below), it’s a safe bet that the US share of users is now below the 50% mark.

Finally the Sysomos research confirms what study after study has shown – a core of committed users accounts for most activity, and the rate of churn is very high – over 80%.

In March, Twitter users who had been with the network for 9+ month accounted for 41.6% of activity, while so-called newbies who had joined in the first three months only accounted for 22%.

Kirk LaPointe’s media blog points us towards this report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which takes a look at news consumption in the United States.

Bearing in mind that the whole death of print trend is arguably more advanced in the US than in the UK or Australia, it’s worth a look.   Key points:

• The young are least likely to be regular news consumers.  35% of 18-29 year olds follow the news all or most of the time.   For people aged 65+ that rises to 70%

• However, it’s impossible to blank out the news completely and 99% of Americans do admit to getting news, at least casually in some shape or form.   Local (78%) and national (73%) TV leads, followed by the Internet (61%).   By contrast, 50% read a local paper, 54% listen to the radio, while 17% read a ‘national’ newspaper (the latter stat would be different in say the UK, due to the stronger position of national newspapers)

• News is also consumed across several channels simultaneously, 46% of Americans use between four of the six news platforms

The report also looks at Internet news consumption in more detail.    Less than four in ten (38%) Americans rely solely on news from offline sources, the majority (59%) rely on both on and offline sources, while 2% only get their news online.   It’s worth remembering however that ‘offline’ includes TV and radio as well as print.

Tying into some of the stats mentioned above, the research found that online news consumers were by and large both better educated and younger than the average.    So, the median age of all news consumers was 58, but for people who get their news online it was 40.

Finally, and this is a stat we mentioned in the recent ‘Rabbit Feed’ (our weekly newsletter over at Rabbit), news is now much more of a social phenomenon.   Three quarters (75%) of adults that get their news online say they get it forwarded to them through email or social media.

And it works in a virtuous circle.   News gets forwarded online via social media from people who at the same time deepen their engagement with the news.  97% of American social network users read the news online, and 51% of that 97% get news forwarded onto them via friends on places like Facebook on a typical day.

Strengthening the role of Twitter as a network that has influence and importance beyond its 10-15 million worldwide active user base, it’s also worth noting that the study found that 99% of Twitter users are online news consumers.

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• Internet changes news consumption landscape (news.cnet.com)
• Pew report: We get our news everywhere (trueslant.com)

Two charts from the current Economist special report on social networking. First of all, according to Nielsen, “measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy.”

By comparison, Americans spent on average six hours a month on social networks in October, almost 3x as much as in October 2007.

Secondly, a chart that again confirms the dominance of Facebook as being for social media what Google is for search. The other day I mentioned a Reuters article questioning whether Facebook was achieving technological ‘lock-in’, becoming a default that’s difficult to shift.

As well as Google, Reuters actually compared Facebook with the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard – introduced in the 1870s as the default for keyboards, and not the best or most logical solution out there but simply the one that stuck.

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• Australians world’s biggest users of social media (mumbrella.com.au)
• Blame Canada: Facebook Being Probed Over Privacy – Again (gigaom.com)
• Gangster Prisoner ‘Issued Facebook Threats’ (news.sky.com)
• Time Spent on Social Networks Increases by 82% in 2009 (rotorblog.com)
• The social network juggernaut rolls on (theequitykicker.com)

On the back of its June Twitter research, which looked into the geographic spread of the Twitter population, research firm Sysomos has produced an update.   The new Sysomos report has non-US users inching towards 50% of the total, and shows that the network as a whole is a lot less anglophone today than it was in June.

US users now account for 50.88% of the total, down from 62.1%.   The UK’s share has remained more or less constant on 7.2%, but it’s been overtaken by Brazil, which has the second highest Twitter population at 8.79% as a whole.

Bear in mind that Brazil’s Internet penetration is around 35-40% with 32 million users, while the UK’s is 76% with 37 million users.   As a result, when looking at it in these terms, Brazil scores even higher (anyone know why Twitter is, relatively speaking, so popular there?).

When it comes to the total number of tweets, as opposed to users, a slightly different picture emerges.   This gives an indication as to where the most active twitter population is.   Here, the US is still comfortably in front with 56.59% of messages, the UK is second with 8.09% and Brazil is 3rd with 6.73%.

What does all this mean for marketers?   Several months ago when advising a European client I called Twitter an overwhelmingly English speaking network that (in Europe) does much better in the UK than elsewhere.    That holds true today, though it’s certainly less true than it was then.

Six months ago the US + UK + Canada + Australia accounted for 78.5% of the total Twitter population – almost eight in ten.   Today that figure is 64.82% – less than two thirds.

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• Study confirms US dominance of Twitter (socialmediatoday.com)

Something that’s been discussed at length in the past, and is also a topic on the agenda for the forthcoming Bean Cast, is the whole issue of agencies practicing what they preach in terms of social media.

So…it’s easy to rock up and recycle some stats and facts about consumers taking control, being part of the conversation, blah, blah…but do you have any credibility if you don’t have any 1st hand experience of being in this space yourself?

Not surprisingly my answer is not really.   I wouldn’t go as far as saying that you need years of Internet experience, but some kind of hands-on, direct knowledge is crucial.

Unfortunately AdWeek has stats that show that all too often what we do is window dressing – while 56% of agency bosses say their company has a blog, 66% blog no more than once a month.   Similarly 56% say they have a Twitter presence, but at the same time 57% tweet once a month or less.

Part of the problem, from personal experience, is finding the right way to use agency profiles so that it’s not a straight forward sales pitch, and that it’s updated often enough.

At Cow our Twitter feed was until last month, used fairly infrequently, for the simple reason that the two people updating it – my fellow digital Cow, Louise, and myself - each had our own personal Twitter profiles and just naturally concentrated on those 1st, even if it concerned agency news.

The solution we came up with was to give the feed to everyone in the agency on rotation where they talk about things of interest to them, which personally I think makes it less sales focused, as well as making it look more busy.   It also puts more of a human stamp on our – corporate – social media profiles.

An example from Australia

On a much larger scale, McCanns in Australia and New Zealand, seems to have much the same in mind.  Strategist Mark Pollard has a post up today on how the agency is celebrating its 50th anniversary in Oz – and a key part involves a complete website revamp – preview image above.

By the looks of things, the site will become primarily ‘social’, much like CP&B did the other month.   But there’s an added element in that McCann staffers have created new stuff specifically for it.

When the site goes live tomorrow, new content created by staff in Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney will go live, with an internal incentive for the content that gets viewed the most.

According to Mark, “through the project we’re hoping people get to experience the power – or perhaps lack of – of their own personal networks, the role content plays in social and search, the unpredictability of being online, how being transparent and authentic is not to be feared, and so on.”

And so to rounds things off, maybe the secret in where some agencies go wrong can be found in the questions asked in that survey.

Agencies bosses were asked about social media…yet these are people who still by and large learned their craft in a traditional marketing world.   Some of us are ‘digital immigrants’ in the sense that we’ve made the effort to learn, while others are less active.

We tell our clients that consumers now have control over our brands.  Perhaps the same applies to us.  Rather than adopting a top down model in controlling our social media policies, the way for agencies to become both authentic and effective is for everyone who is part of our organisation to feed into them.

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• Laziest social media campaign yet? (mumbrella.com.au)
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One of my personal inspirations when being one of the original team that set up Cow was Andy Law’s book ‘Open Minds.’    In it, Law talked about the creation of ad agency St Lukes in the 90s, which broke the mould by truly standing for something radical – in this case the idea that the people who provide the ‘sweat equity’ for an agency should also have a say in how it’s run.

The PR Warrior (Trevor Young) in Australia reminded me of that today in his post, ‘if you don’t stand for something, you are nothing.’  Trevor says that we need to create a story or narrative around brands that goes beyond the actual products – and it has to be authentic.

Trevor also posted this manifesto created by online rental market place Rentoid.   Full marks to them – it’s inspirational, meaningful, devoid of corporate and brand speak, puts its people at the centre.   A lot of us could learn from the sentiments expressed in the presentation!

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• Should Advertising Agencies Be Called Advertising Agencies? (slideshare.net)

A study by Royal Pingdom, which looked through three weeks worth of tweets from 21 Oct – 11 Nov, confirms that Twitter is still very much a US dominated network.

The average number of tweets per hour showed a dip between 8am – 1pm Central European Time (or between 7am – Noon GMT), when Europeans get into work but still the middle of the night for the US.   But at the same time, things clearly picked up around 4pm central Europe, or 10am East Coast US, so near the start of the American working day.

Royal Pingdom also found that people tweet a lot at work with activity going down at weekends.   This shows that Twitter’s ‘power users’ - the 5% who account for 75% of tweets according to a separate study by Sysomos – are biased towards professionals who have Twitter open in the office even though they might be broadcasting personal messages.

That previous study by Sysomos confirms Twitter’s US and also anglophone bias.   Sysomos found that 62% of users were in the US with the UK trailing far behind in second place with 8%.   Canada had 5% of users and Australia 3%.

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• Americans enjoy middle-of-the-night web surfing more than Europeans do (thenextweb.com)
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It might be raining and you are in a foul mood, but at least you are thinking more clearly.

That’s the findings of a group of Australian researchers who tested consumer memory in good and bad weather. As reported by the British Psychological Society, 73 shoppers were put in a newsagents and asked to recall ten objects. Half went in on good weather days and half when the weather was bad.

Not surprisingly, the bad weather test subjects were in a worse mood than their good weather counterparts. However, the ones who went in when it was raining could identify 3x as many objects. Rainy day shoppers were also less likely to have “false memories.”

Apparently what this study proves is that a bad mood (which you have when the weather is bad), “triggers a more sceptical, careful mode of processing, in contrast to the less vigilant, conceptual thinking style that characterises a good mood.”

The researchers say that these findings could be applied in legal and forensic situations.

It’s obviously got a lot of relevance for marketers as well and shows that there is some sense (supposing your product isn’t seasonal) to weighting a lot of spend towards the summer….or even to incorporate a weather forecast into your media plans. And if you’ve got a technical or specialised message you want to get out (say for a financial product), the rain might even be best.

Image – Akakumo