Sounds about right…
“One of the things we need to get into context here is that traditional media isn’t dead yet and won’t be for the next five years. It’s very important to think why. The over-50s are helping to sustain traditional media, and also in many of the emerging markets there is still plenty of room for traditional media. The death of traditional media is exaggerated, at least in a five-year context.” – via paidContent via Press Gazzette
“He forecast that global print advertising will grow 1.8 percent to $123.3 billion in 2012, while global digital advertising will grow 19.3 percent to $13.4 billion.” via Press Gazzette
These two quotes obviously go hand in hand. The more advertising dollars spent in the digital medium has a direct effect on the outcome (read: demise) of traditional news mediums. The phone book theory is a small but very relevant. Why on earth would businesses pay to play when they can be on Google for free and run AdWords on the cheap. For now it’s because they don’t get it. Companies like ours is here to help those that “don’t get it” along – but someday soon (real soon) Joe the Plumber will and phone books will be a dead industry. If you scale the phone book theory to, say, newspapers you can likely expect the same outcome.
I would think you can expect a down economy not only to perpetuate this theory but to push its outcome faster. In a recession, dollars spent on traditional advertising budgets will be cut and re-purposed to cheaper (and I would argue more effective) mediums like AdWords or other forms of highly effective and relatively cheap digital advertising models – or even *gasp* free methods of marketing and measurement using social media. It’s the economy, stupid.
Combine these thoughts with the demographic shifts mentioned in the above quotes and it becomes clear… the model is dead (as if it wasn’t obvious yet): move on. You have less than five years to catch up – and there are already people on the move to cut you out of the business altogether.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Andy,
For small businesses, don\’t you think they\’re more likely to go with the Craigslist (no money) option than spend any money, especially in a down economy? If we buy the argument that it\’s the Craigslist model that\’s killing print media more than anything else (choking off dollars that used to come in through classifieds, I guess…), the death of print media might correlate with a general suffering of any player banking on the small business advertising dollar. So I don\’t disagree with the things you point out in this post but it might be worth mentioning that the concept of disintermediation can affect new media money-making tactics as well the old ones.
This is not my thinking, btw, just parroting a thoughtful comment from way back: http://www.crunchnotes.com/2007/03/25/print-media-demise-cont/#comment-58697