Submission + - Are Newspapers Getting Too Many Ad Dollars? 2
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Even though newspapers have lost nearly half of their ad revenue in the last five years, Alan Mutter writes in "Reflections of a Newsosaur" that a recent report shows that newspapers get three times more advertising dolars than their readership deserves. Television, for example, represents about 43% of the time Americans spend consuming media and broadcasters collect about 43% of the advertising dollars, so that sounds about right. But even though consumers spend barely 5% of their time reading newspapers, eMarketer found that publishers are getting 17% of the ad spend and in the most egregious mismatch discovered by the study, only 0.5% of advertising dollars go to mobile phones even though people spend more than 8% of their media time using them. Internet ad dollars are also being shortchanged with 25% of media mindshare devoted to the Internet and barely 19% of ad dollars going to the web. "This is good news for newspaper publishers because it proves that they have done an excellent job to date of convincing marketers of the value of their medium," writes Mutter. "It also is bad news for publishers, because it represents a formidable threat: What would happen if advertisers began to wonder why they are spending so much on newspapers when they can use cheaper and more targetable advertising to reach the growing audiences on the web, mobile and social media?""
