Circulation Increases Four Times As Fast As The Internet Is Growing – No, Don’t Get All Excited -- It’s Visitors to Newspaper Web Sites. On the Other Hand, Maybe That Is Something to Get Excited About!

So now the trick is to convince advertisers that when looking at newspaper circulation numbers they should also be including the newspaper’s web traffic, too. And it shouldn’t really be that difficult for smart newspaper marketing people to hatch up advertising programs for their print customers that includes the web, too.

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Newspapers really want to protect their print income. With historic margins of around 20%, the newspaper business was a good business to be in. Still is. The problem is that the soothsayers look at dramatic falls in newspaper circulation, advertisers taking their spend to the Internet, the young leaving in droves meaning older reading demographics which the advertisers don’t like so much, and they say the future looks grim..

Add to that the likes of Criagslist that siphons off classified advertising for free – revenue that represents some 20 – 30% of a newspaper’s income -- and just how can those 20% margins be maintained?

The key, of course, is the Internet. Problem is that advertising rates for the Internet are so much less than for print so even picking up lost advertising from the print edition onto the Internet site instead while helpful doesn’t recover everything. The trick, of course, is to have the advertiser be paying for both.

There is really big money to be made on Internet advertising if you can really dominate the market – and for news and information newspapers are beginning to achieve that.

Would you believe that MSN has charged as much as $1 million for an ad that appears just 24 hours on its home page? That compares with $25,000 - $50,000 just four years ago! Web portals have increased their rates by as much as 20% this year and still some report they have 18-month waiting lists, and now believe it is smarter to turn away such advanced booking because they think rates will keep going up, so why lock in an advertisers at today’s lower rate. It’s reversing the “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” syndrome, but goes to show how much people really believe the Internet ‘s growth pattern is an arrow continually pointing upwards.

About 95% of today’s display advertising is spent on the top 50 sites, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, but the inventory is growing tighter and tighter. Advertisers are seeking alternative sites and a dominating newspaper site is as good as any.

According to Nielsen/Net Ratings newspaper sites in October attracted 39.3 million unique visitors – that’s an 11% increase over a year ago. And remember in the past six months newspaper readership went down 2.6%! That 11% easily outstripped the overall Internet usage growth of 3%. So, it seems pretty obvious that the public has not forgotten newspapers, it’s just that some would rather read electronically than on paper.

The numbers for newspaper web sites are already pretty staggering, with the New York Times first with 11.4 million monthly visitors and USA Today with 10.4 million – both newspapers managing in the past six months to basically hold on to their existing print circulation while growing on the web.

What is interesting is the next three – the Washington Post with 8.1 million visitors, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle with 3.9 million each. All three newspapers have been suffering large print circulation losses – the Chronicle down about 17% in the past six months – but their web site usage continually grows.

The Chronicle, of course, is on the northern edge of Silicon Valley. At the southern end is the San Jose Mercury-News, and both newspapers have instituted buyouts in the past months because of dropping circulation and advertising. Could it be that many of their subscribers in the Silicon Valley no longer want to resort to paper and are more comfortable reading their news on a screen? If those readers are still there, but on the screen, then shouldn’t they somehow be counted among the newspaper’s readership?

The advertiser won’t give a hoot, of course, whether circulations are combined unless their advertising message gets across to both sets of readers. Newspapers are beginning to make a big deal out of making their print and Internet newsrooms into one to produce a better editorial product. The same needs to be done on the advertising side, too.

The issue on the advertising side is that print currently generates far more advertising money than the Internet, so that is the natural sale to make, especially where commissions are concerned. But if the soothsayers are correct about the future then it will be the smart newspaper that integrates the business side as well as editorial, and offering advertisers packages that prove how a combined print/internet buy is the best deal around!

In the old days this used to be called cross-selling. Today it is called survival.

Circulation Increases Four Times As Fast As The Internet Is Growing – No, Don’t Get All Excited -- It’s Visitors to Newspaper Web Sites. On the Other Hand, Maybe That Is Something to Get Excited About!

For all the really bad news about US newspaper circulation figures – down 1.2 million in the past six months – there was one piece of good news: the numbers show undeniably that newspaper web sites are the most frequently visited for news and information.

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