Advertising expenditure in newspapers rose by 2.4% in the third quarter of 2005, with online up by an impressive 26.7%. The print medium did not fair so well seeing an increase of just 1.6%, with Q3’s modest gain the medium’s worst advertising performance this year.
Despite a depressed market for the newspaper industry, online readership is shown to be rising at a healthy pace, increasing its share of newspaper revenues and resulting in more and more marketers shifting their budgets online.
New estimates released by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) found that advertising expenditure in the US totalled $12 billion in the third quarter of 2005, with $11.4 billion spend on print and $519 million online.
According to the NAA, national advertising fell by 4.7% compared to this time last year, dropping to $1.8 billion, with the decline attributed to loses in telecom, travel and motion picture adspend.
Classified were shown to enjoy a steady 5.5% increase reaching $4.2 billion, while retail adspend rose by 1%.
For the year so far, the NAA estimates that total newspaper advertising spend rose by $35.1 billion after the first three quarters, up 2.9% year on year, with print adpsend accounting for $33.6 billion, 2% higher that the same period last year.
New data from Nielsen//NetRatings confirms the rise in online newspaper websites popularity, with figures showing growth of 11% in unique visitors between October 2004 and October 2005, a rate faster than the 3% growth of active users on the entire internet (see Newspaper Websites Increase In Use).
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, 39.3 million visitors logged onto newspaper websites in the US in October, representing one-quarter of all active internet users.
The online newspaper industry is growing in strength, and is forecast to increase its presence in the market, with previous research from eMarketer, predicting revenues to increase to $2.26 billion in 2008, up from $1.03 billion in 2004 (see Online Newspaper Industry Forecast To Enjoy Strong Gains).
Online news is now seen as commonplace, and is increasingly being used as an information source. A survey earlier in the year by Merrill Brown for the Carnegie Corporation revealed that the US population is shifting to the internet as their primary source of news (see Internet Becoming Primary News Source In US).
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