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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While the New York Times reports that 2009 was officially the worst year for the newspaper industry in ‘decades’, journalism blogger and pundit Alan Mutter says 2010 could be even worse.

Three US based stats from Alan’s blog:

1 – Classified advertising is down a massive 64% from the $17.3 billion it brought US papers in 2005.  Thanks Craiglist, and in the UK, the likes of gumtree

2 – Retail advertising was down 36% over the same period

3 – National advertising was down 44% since 2005

The problem is of course also a demographic one.   Apparently in the US, the average age of newspaper readers is 55+ as shown in the video below (via Steveouting.com).

And the UK probably isn’t too different in that respect, a Parliamentary Committee two years ago found that newspaper readership fell 40% among 25-34 year olds, but rose by 4% among 55-64 year olds – and if anything that trend will have increased over the past two years, given that the UK nationals have lost more than the population of Wales in readers since then.

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Back in April there were comparisons of Twitter = the new Second Life (i.e the hyped network of 2009) when Nielsen said that 60% of users lost interest after registering, leaving their accounts dormant.

Though Twitter won’t be heading into obscurity like the virtual world (this New York Times article gives some good reasons why), it’s still the case that Twitter’s actual user base is small compared to the number of registrations as some new stats from RJMetrics show.

In fact, according to RJMetrics, Twitter’s rate of churn isn’t 60% as Nielsen found in April, it’s 80%+, with only 17% of Twitter accounts sending a single tweet over the past month.

By comparison, back in 2007 when Twitter was much smaller and really just for tech early adopters, 70% were making regular use of it.   RJ Metrics boss Robert J Moore says that the key period really is the first week – if someone gets to grips with the micro-blogging service in the first seven days, the chances are that they will stick with it.

Based on that churn rate, rather than 75 million registered Twitter users, RJ Metrics says that the real number of people who actually use it is more like 10-15 million worldwide.   And based on earlier research by Sysomos, 51% of that user base is in the US, 9% in Brazil, 7% in the UK, 4% in Canada and 2% in Australia, so roughly speaking the number of active of active UK tweeple is around 700-900k.

RJ Metrics says that users who do make use of it are increasingly engaged.  This mirrors the report by Sysomos last year about Twitter’s power users – the most committed 5% who account for 75% of tweets.  

Sysomos found that they were more likely to work in tech, the media and so had the ability to take things that they saw on Twitter elsewhere.   Indeed, the gap between something breaking on Twitter and hitting the mainstream media can be as little as four hours.

Reuters yesterday posted an article that with its worldwide user base of 300 million Facebook was approaching ‘technological lock-in’ and becoming a new Google – a default Internet technology that’s difficult to ever shift.   Based on the numbers above, Twitter is not remotely about to reach that kind of status, but while it doesn’t tick the ‘reach’ box, it does tick the influence one.

Image – FotoSpawn

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