Newspapers: Online Ads Up, Print Ads Down

I’ve been noticing the trend towards online advertising as compare to any conventional method is increasing at a very interesting rate. A good sign for all of you who would like to start developing some business online. Here’s an article that is good to back us up.

Print advertising continues to slide while online advertising in newspapers is growing consistently. According to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) advertising expenditures for newspaper websites increased 21.1%, to $773 million, in the third quarter. That was compared to the third quarter in 2006. It’s a trend that looks promising - this is the 14th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth for online newspaper advertising since the NAA started reporting online ad spending in 2004.

While print advertising is still the majority of advertising with newspapers (newspaper website advertising now accounts for 7.1% of total newspaper ad spending), the online spend continues to get bigger. Spending for online ads is still in the millions while print advertising brings in $10.1 billion. And print advertising is down 9% compared with the third quarter of 2006.

Here are some more numbers for various types of advertising: classified advertising fell 17% to $3.4 billion. Retail declined 4.9% to $5.1 billion, and national was down 2.5%, coming in at $1.7 billion.

Just considering classifieds ads, real estate, car classifieds, and employment ads were all down, but all other classifieds were up 2.7% to $713.3 million. Obviously the housing market slowdown has affected real estate and has spilled into other categories.