Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online

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Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online

reader Surprise.

All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.

This exercise was prompted by recent posts by John Duncan of Inksniffer, in which he argues that “internet metrics substantially exaggerate the importance of the newspaper web audience.” Duncan (who seems to have revived Inksniffer from a long dormancy with a series of math-heavy posts during March), provides calculations supporting his conclusion that in the UK, online sites have only 17 percent of the page impressions delivered by printed newspapers.

Let’s examine how this looks in the U.S. First, print impressions: The NAA’s research shows a “daily” (Monday through Saturday) print audience of 116.8 million, and a Sunday print audience of 134.1 million. (This is much higher than paid circulation, but there are 2.128 readers per daily copy, and 2.477 on Sunday.)

We don’t have clear data about the average number pages each member of that audience looks at, but let’s make an educated guess: 24. That translates to about 87.1 billion printed page views per month*. As a check on our assumption of 24 pages: based on annual newsprint consumption of 9 million metric tons, the industry prints about 190 billion pages (a mix of tabloid and broadsheet sizes). So we’re assuming the average reader looks at about half the pages published, which seems reasonable.

Now the online side, where we have a more accurate measurement: NAA reports the daily newspaper online audience as measured by Nielsen in both unique visitors and page views. For 2008, it averaged 3.2 billion online page views per month. (There’s no readers per copy multiplier there, on the assumption that nearly always, there’s just one pair of eyeballs per online page view.)

So, U. S. daily newspapers deliver a total of 90.3 billion page impressions per month, print and online. The online share of these page is only 3.5 percent — 96.5 percent of page impressions delivered by newspapers are in print.

Another massage of the numbers, this time in terms of time spent: The NAA’s Nielsen numbers say that the average unique visitor to newspaper web sites spends about 45 minutes per month. So with a unique visitor audience that averaged 67.3 million during 2008, newspaper web sites were viewed a total of 3.03 billion minutes per month.

How much time was spent with printed newspapers? NAA doesn’t offer a study providing an average, nor can I find one elsewhere, but I’m going to use 25 minutes Monday-Saturday and 35 minutes on Sunday. ** Multiplying this out, we get 96.5 billion minutes per month spent with printed newspapers.

So in terms of attention span, newspapers hold readers a total of 99.5 billion minutes per month, of which only 3.0 percent is online. This correlates nicely with the pageview split.

So whether you look at page views or time spent reading, only around 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. I’ve made a few estimates along the way to reach that conclusion, but only a drastic and unwarranted change in my few guestimates would change that result signficantly.

Is it any wonder then, that online revenue is stuck at less than 10 percent of the print revenue? Given the online share of audience attention, 10 percent looks high, actually. Let’s explore that revenue dimension further by comparing print and online CPMs.

Online, in 2008, NAA reports total newspaper site revenue of $3.109 billion; total page views of 38.726 billion. Online revenue per 1000 page views (CPM): $80.28. (That should raise your eyebrows, because if there are maybe three ads on the average page, it means the average ad is selling for more than $25 per 1000 views, which would be off the charts for most sites. I don’t buy that number, but that question is the subject for more research and hopefully a future post.)

On the print side, NAA reports 2008 revenue of $34.74 billion. Dividing that by 12 months and 83.6 billion printed pages per month, we get a print CPM of $34.62.

Does this make sense? Is it possible that newspapers are managing to demand and obtain an online pageview CPM that’s 2.3 times their printed page CPM? Are the online sales teams that much better than their print colleagues? Or, dare I say it, is it possible that newspapers assigning, by accounting maneuvers, a disproportionate share of their revenue to their online divisions, for example when they arbitrarily assign to online a percentage of the revenue in combination print/web ad packages, or credit a revenue share to online revenue in instances where advertisers are merely bonused online exposure as added value to a print buy?

The fact remains, of course, that not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession. Finding a solution for these industry problems demands careful monitoring of where the audience is actually spending its time and attention. While the audience’s online attention seems to be a surprisingly low 3 percent, online is clearly where the audience is migrating to. In my mind, as I’ve written pretty consistently since last September, the solution is an online-print hybrid in which print is consolidated to one, two or three editions per week, not seven.

POSTSCRIPT, Tuesday April 14, 7:30 a.m.: Dan Thornton at The Way of the Web, has posted some very relevant cautions and caveats to this analysis (but calls it “a good reality check”) and some of the commenters have raised fair questions about the legitimacy of the data. I’ll continue to disagree with those who say in effect, “I don’t see any newspapers being read by two or more people, therefore it doesn’t happen.” I too, know many reporters and editors who don’t read their own paper in print, but of all the data I used, the Scarborough research on readers per copy is the longest-running, most consistent survey, and its results cross-check with “read yesterday” survey data.

As I’ve noted in the comments, I’ve made two assumptions based on scanty information (minutes spent reading print, and number of print pages read). But even if I’ve overestimated those by 100 percent or 200 percent, the analysis still reaches the same conclusion, which is that within the limits of newspaper readership in print and online, the public still reads newspaper content in print by an overwhelming margin. The attention drift is toward online reading, but it’s not as rapid a drift as most of us have been assuming. Is this good news? No, because as pointed out by in the comments, the print-side problem is not readership, it’s advertising, particularly the loss of monopoly pricing power in most categories. And of course, non-newspaper sites are grabbing a big slice of the migration of attention online.

I want to emphasize that this analysis was limited to newspapers and newspaper sites as input to that industry’s ongoing search for business models that work. Any individual newspaper or newspaper group has at their command internal data to repeat this analysis more accurately for themselves, and I’d encourage them to do so. There has been a tendency in the industry to inflate the significance of unique visitors. As noted by Josh Benton in the comments, 100,000 monthly unique visitors on the site is not nearly the same as 100,000 print subscribers, but you can find such statistics conflated into equivalence on everything from ad sales materials to 10-K reports. What the industry really needs to do is to develop a valid, independently-audited measure of audience attention. Who knows, it might even help them sell some print advertising.

FOLLOW UP / RELATED POSTS: I have more to say on this general topic in two followup posts:

________

*Method: Multiplying daily readers times 313, Sunday readers times 52, adding the results, multiplying by 24 pages read, dividing by 12 months.

**According a print newspaper “engagement” study presented a few years ago, on weekdays 45 percent of readers spent more than 30 minutes, 34 percent between 16 and 30 minutes, 21 percent under 15 minutes. Sunday time is higher.

Photo by Dustin Diaz, used under Creative Commons License.

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http://www.niemanlab.org/ Joshua Benton

Martin, I’ll agree with you that online stats do tend to overweight the importance of the online audience vs. print. That is, 100,000 monthly unique visitors is a *lot* less valuable than 100,000 print subscribers, even if the numbers look equal at a glance. And I agree with you a lot on the long-term solutions.

That said, I would be shocked — and not Casablanca-style “shocked, shocked”; genuinely shocked — if some of the assumptions here are correct: that the average time spent with a daily newspaper is anywhere near a half-hour; that the average print reader looked at anywhere near half the pages of each edition; and that the reader-per-copy multiplier is what NAA says it is. I think any industry group has an interest in making its numbers look as impressive as possible, but I strongly suspect those are substantial overestimates.

(Not to mention the idea of $80 average per-pageview CPM, which is insane.)
http://burden.ca/blog/ Tim Burden

Readers per issue more than two? I’d say less than one. Free weeklies used as flyer wrap, free dailies that get pulled out of box and never read. I sometimes buy a paper or grab a free just to do the puzzles on the bus. How’d they come up with that number?

Readers read half the pages in a newspaper? Way overblown. I read maybe one or two sections out of a daily. I throw away well over half the paper, let alone read all the pages in the sections I do keep.

Multiplied together, those two assumptions alone could reduce your numbers for print pageviews 10-fold.

Then there is what Josh points out, that the “print audience” numbers are likely inflated to begin with.

Which is not to say you don’t have a point. A scary point, actually.
http://www.contentbridges.com Ken Doctor

Martin: You’ve hit a nail on the head. Online revenue may well be disproportionate to print, given the Attention Gap. There’s a substantial Attention Gap between print and online as your post wells shows. I do think that daily reading is down to 10-12 minutes, in fits and starts — and given much less to read, at least 20% less stuff over the last several years. Still, the overall point is the big one, and just reinforces a central tenet here. We’ve got the beginnings of hugely disruptive technology here, both on the ad and reader sides, but the economic devastation of newspapers is much more due to ad disruption than reader disruption. Good work. Ken
http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/ Martin Langeveld

Josh and Tim:
I’ve actually got just two assumptions in there, the rest comes from published survey stats, mostly NAA and Nielsen. on the pageviews calculation, I assume that the average reader looks at 24 pages daily. If that’s high, lets cut it in half; you’ll find the online pageview share goes to 7%, still pretty small. On the time-spent analysis, let’s cut half an hour down to 15 minutes, and you get an online time share of 6%. Either way, 93 or 94% of reading is in print.

Readers per issue more than 2? Yes — that’s been a pretty consistent Scarborough conclusion since the 1950s. And we’re talking just dailies here, not free weeklies and the rest.
Zachary M. Seward

I think there are a lot of important points here, but I don’t agree with most of the assumptions. The ones I’d question are:

— The print pass-along rate. Others have done a more thorough job than I could at questioning whether each copy of a newspaper is really read by 2-point-whatever people. I doubt it for a lot of reasons. Subscribers will say that the rest of their family reads the paper because that’s what the surveyor wants to hear and a newspaper-reading family is socially valued.

I also think the NAA, ABC, and others who promote the “pass-along” rate aren’t counting the many, many newspaper copies at hotels, on doorsteps, and elsewhere for which the rate is zero. On my commute to work, which entails some walking and a bus ride, I see more untouched newspapers than I see newspapers being read. I think it’s only fair — and possibly generous — to assume that each copy of a newspaper is read once.

— Pages viewed per print copy. I have no idea how to estimate this, but I agree with Josh that way more than half of the average newspaper goes unread. Let’s say that people read 12 pages, which I still think is generous, instead of your 24.

— That a pageview in print can be compared to a pageview online. Turning past a page in print (because you don’t want to read the articles or ads there) counts as viewing it, but you have to click (because you do want to read the article) to register a pageview online. I don’t have a better comparison, but that matters when we talk about advertising value.

— Only counting pageviews at newspaper sites. This is perhaps the most important assumption I’d question. Why aren’t we counting news sites that aren’t run by newspapers? Fewer than half of the top 30 news sites are newspaper sites, and that list overestimates it (by lumping together every newspaper site run by a single company). We’d also have to count print magazines, but I still think that news sites would actually end up accounting for more page views.

But even if we count only newspapers and newspaper sites, under my new assumptions, there are 20 billion print pageviews per month (instead of your 87 billion), which would mean online accounts for 14% of newspaper reading, not 3%. —Zach
http://byjoeybaker.com Joey Baker

@Zach–

Love the last point you make about aggregators, but still frustrated that the math isn’t working out. Sheer gut feeling tells me that the numbers should be roughly equal.

Other thoughts to consider:
• Newsorg websites tend to put a lot of headlines on the front page (it’s either bad web design, or intentionally done for SEO), but this means that users can see many more stories without the equivalent number of pageviews.
• Is RSS counted in those numbers? (I know it’s likely insignificant, but still…)
http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/ Martin Langeveld

Zach, if you’re right about the pass-along issue, then NAA is publishing bogus numbers on its site, and Scarborough has been wrong for 50 years. Given that the median US household is 2.59 people, a readership of 2+ per copy seems perfectly reasonable to me. Sure, there may be some survey bias and I’m sure Scarborough has tested for that. But that number also works if you come at it the other way, looking at the percentage of the population who report reading a newspaper “yesterday” and dividing by paid circulation.

And as I said, even the average reader only looks at, or reads, 12 pages, the online share only goes up to 6 or 7 percent, which doesn’t alter my conclusion that the overwhelming share of attention is in print.

You disagree that page views online can be compared with print page views, and that may be valid, but a minute reading online can certainly be compared with a minute reading print, and the time-spent ratio shows essentially the same split.

“Only counting pageviews at newspaper sites” — I did that because I’m looking at the daily newspaper business here. If we start adding in page views from other news sites, we also need to include print page views from non-daily newspapers as well as magazines, which is beyond the scope of the analysis. The 96.5/3.5 ratio pertains to daily newspapers, not a broader set of media (although it might not change much if the scope were altered on both sides).
Mark

$80 CPM for newspapers? Are you insane? Most papers are lucky to get $8. If the NAA is reporting $3.109 billion in online newspaper revenue, I have no doubt that most of that number is from online upsells/value-adds for print campaigns. Translation: not really online revenue at all.

And 24 print page views per reader? Again, not in the real world. I’m a pretty dedicated newspaper reader, and that is, indeed, the average number of pages I read – when I read at all. About three days a week I throw away the entire paper because I’m too busy to read even one page.
http://thebucketblog.com Frymaster

Couple points on the online side should go under the heading Nielsen is Full of It.

1. Any web geek worth his or her salt knows that the numbers put out by Nielsen/comScore are, at best, a vastly underestimated guess. These are panel-derived figures based on surveys. All geeks know that the most accurate measure is from the web server logs that track each and every client request (aka “hits).

“Oh, but how do we know if somebody is viewing from work and then from home? How do we know if two different users view the site from the same IP address?”

Use your panel data to create estimated formulas to account for this. At least you’re starting with ACTUAL data. Nielsen/comScore exist ONLY to give advertisers data that advertisers trust. Why they trust a 3rd party guess and not actual data, who knows. Advertisers aren’t the brightest bulbs either.

2. Specific to the Nielsen/NAA data, nobody actually knows what that measures. I defy anybody to find the list of websites that are included, or the formula by which they “de-duplicated” these data. That number stinks, and I’ve never trusted it because it is so opaque.

3. Whether or not anybody reads the paper is not the issue. Does anybody want to PAY to ADVERTISE in the paper or on the paper’s website? That’s the issue. Come up with a real answer.
http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/ Martin Langeveld

@Mark: “$80 CPM” — my question exactly. “24 print page views” — you and others question this anecdotally, but it works out to about one half of all the printed pages being read, once only, by someone (not by the average reader as I too quickly wrote). There are 200-page Sunday papers in that mix. Can anyone find a study that speaks to this, or to the minutes-spent-with-print question?
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Dan Browning

I think you might be optimistic thinking people look at half of the print pages. My educated guess would put it at a third. But that doesn’t change your point, which is an excellent one. There’s another reason why print is more valuable to some advertisers: The readers shop at local stores. A good deal of the online readership lives far away from the newspaper. Maybe they’re former residents. Or maybe their fans of a particluar football or baseball team. Or maybe the story they’re reading has broad geographic appeal or is simply a touching human interest tale. Presumably, national advertisers would still welcome those page views. But local advertisers don’t get much when someone in Switzerland logs on to the Palm Beach Post to read a story about the outfall from the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/ Martin Langeveld

@Mark and others: by the way, I ran McClatchy’s numbers using Quantcast pageviews (which @Frymaster might like better than Nielsen), and came up with a page CPM of $87, which exceeds the NAA average. I’m looking for similar info on all publicly-reporting newspaper chains.
http://blog.wired.com/business John C Abell

How does this tell us anything other than newspapers aren’t read online much — which is exactly the point often made regarding alternatives to newspaper sites.

Is it your conclusion that that an infinitesimal amount of news is consumed on the internet relative to newspapers, or that newspaper readers aren’t flocking to the web? The former makes no sense, and the latter would be borderline irrelevant if it didn’t say something disturbing about the demographic.

But frankly studies which limit themselves to newspaper metrics (digital and not) miss the point entirely: there is a vast appetite for news online, and newspaper companies aren’t capturing that business very well, for whatever reason.
DD

I’m a former newspaper Web site editor for a 40,000+ daily and here’s how I crunched my numbers: We had 90,000-100,000 readers of the paper and 24,000 unique visitors to the Web site on a daily basis. Of these unique visitors, one-third were local. So our “mostly local” content (news and ads) was reaching less than 10 percent of the local audience. Over two years, the number of local unique visitors rose by one-third, but it’s still a minority audience. Online revenue stalled over those two years; print revenue plummeted.
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http://sellingprint.blogspot.com MichaelJ

The appropriate metric might be scanning as opposed to “reading” For advertisers they want their ads scanned not read. The very fact that print can be scanned in the background, without the decision to read is exactly what makes paper real estate so valuable.
http://www.thedigitalists.com Greg H

Martin wrote:
“Only counting pageviews at newspaper sites” — I did that because I’m looking at the daily newspaper business here. If we start adding in page views from other news sites, we also need to include print page views from non-daily newspapers as well as magazines, which is beyond the scope of the analysis. The 96.5/3.5 ratio pertains to daily newspapers, not a broader set of media (although it might not change much if the scope were altered on both sides).
—

That makes sense methodologically, but it also limits the usefulness of your conclusions, because it assumes the same audience in both media. The New York Times and CNN are very different products that are consumed differently by users, but nytimes.com and cnn.com are, relatively speaking, quite similar (as is Google News). I agree with John Abell above that, even assuming correct methodology, the only thing these data tell us is that newspaper websites haven’t managed to capture large online audiences, not that users have yet to shift their news consumption habits to the Web. Or to put it another way, print may still be king, but that doesn’t mean its kingdom isn’t crumbling around it.

The other question is what this tells us about the future. A few years ago, there was a study reporting that more U.S. households had outhouses than had DVRs. It may have been a useful reality check for those in the early-adopter cocoon, but it was pretty clear at the time that it wouldn’t remain true for long, and it certainly wouldn’t have been a good idea for the outhouse industry to go around claiming they were “still kings of the household.”
http://www.twiiter.com JT

The single most important factor that is not mentioned in the numbers is age. Newspaper readership falls off to about 0% as you get below 40 yrs of age. Zero
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http://www.twitter.com JT

The word “news” means different things to different generations.

“News” used to be whatever was printed in the local daily newspaper — local reporting, syndicated news, crime reports, obituaries, opinion columns, etc.

In the online world “news” comes from any numbers of sources, usually much closer to the story. There is a broader appetite for many kinds of information, for up-to-the-minute information, access to vast amounts of data, visual storytelling, multimedia and social networking.

Print is no longer “news” to most people — it is regurgitated information you read yesterday that is available on thousands of “news” websites.
http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/ Martin Langeveld

@JT: There’s certainly a generational split, but your assertions are the impressions and assumptions most of us have been making that don’t appear to be supported by actual readership data. For example, “Print is no longer ‘news’ to most people” — if that’s the case, why does 96% of newspaper content get read in print? (Among an audience that consists of 48% of US adults weekdays and 55% Sundays?)
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http://www.twitter.com JT

I think the point here is that the print readership assumptions you’re mashing up and guesstimating no longer stand up to common sense. They are more alchemy than science.

There are no valid metrics for print consumption, and whatever methods are conjured up simply don’t translate to online metrics data.
http://ocregister.com jeff light

there numbers are fairly well known; newspaper cpms and web site cpms are about the same in markets with a decent sell through. (the numbers in this article are skewed because the author has taken the number for total newspaper online revenue in his cpm calculation, rather than the number for online display, which should be about 40% of the whole.)
at any rate, this is a useful observation because it reveals audience, not per-page-yield, as the key driver of low web revenues. the issue online for newspapers is volume, not yield.
this is widely misunderstood. people see millions of monthly uniques and think they have a big audience. try looking at daily uniques for a rule-of-thumb on your actual audience. now, divide by 2 to weed out non-locals.
newspapers’ problem is not that money cannot be made online. their problem is that their content is not aggregating significant audience.
crunchydomik

Once I see “educated guess” in a story, I know the research isn’t top-notch, meaning nothing in this piece can be trusted. Quote some experts in the field. Trust me, nobody spends 25 minutes each day receiving the big metro paper I receive because there is absolutely NOTHING in it to read anymore. I barely spend 25 minutes a week now where I once spent 25 minutes a day. Don’t know if this was your first-ever article (since I have never heard of you) but hopefully a peer can teach you some research techniques.
Tim

It’s these kinds of assumptions — that people read half the pages we publish — that kept us in the dark for so long about the efficacy of our strategies and the value of our advertising. At least online has wised us up to what people actually want to see, as unwelcome as the news may be.
Joe Pinner

Please Lord, don’t let cyberspace take my morning newspaper away from me. I subscribe to a paper not a computer. I want details of the overly-used “breaking news” stories given in the (in)famous television twenty-second sound bites and I also want to read warm and fuzzy stories that make you realize we are not entirely in a land of drug deals “gone bad” and as my late friend Dan Miller of WSMV has said in effect…”…weren’t they bad from the start?” I want to read about all the many issues and events and opinions in my neck of the woods. I want to check out the ads and the inserts to compare prices and see what’s new! I want my comics and my wife demands the crossword puzzle not sudoku or whatever that new craze is…don’t need it…old school! And that’s why I love my STATE newspaper. Joe Pinner Radio and Television broadcaster since 1950
http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/ Martin Langeveld

@crunchydomik and others: 25 minutes per day may not be your personal experience, but it’s a reasonable estimate. This 2006 Pew report, http://people-press.org/report/282/online-papers-modestly-boost-newspaper-readership, found the average was 40 minutes. So allowing for the effect of fewer pages, more distractions, whatever, 25 minutes seems OK. But the point is, even if it’s really 15 minutes, or 10, the fundamental conclusion doesn’t change: the online share of the newspaper audience would still be in the single digits.
http://www.johnsumser.com John Sumser

Of what’s left, only 3% is online. That’s one way of making lemonade from lemons. It conveniently ignores:
- what got lost;
- that the online stuff clearly isn’t working; and,
- that the audience is gone.

There’s good news, ma. It may have shrunk by 70%, but only 3% of blacksmithing is being used at the car factory.
http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/ Martin Langeveld

@John Sumser:
Hah, but I didn’t say it was good news. See my last graf. The blacksmith shop is not sustainable, and we’re not selling enough to the car factory.
http://www.aafter.com Subhankar Ray

On a different note, just to reduce the screen/computer time, I prefer to read things printed. Who knows what is the impact of looking at the screen 16 hours a day?
Relayman5C

I just skimmed the comments, but I didn’t see this mentioned: The percentage of print readers who represent Web readers is irrelevant. The problem is that the print readers are dropping significantly and quickly. So if the percentage is 3% today, then it will be 30% within six months. If the percentage is 6% today, then it will be 60% within six months. So it’s silly to argue whether it’s 3% today or 6% today. It’s not the ratio that’s killing newspapers, it’s the drop in advertising revenue, particularly classified advertising. Who knew that the whole business model of the typical newspaper was based on a house of cards?
http://www.mathewingram.com/work Mathew Ingram

I have to agree with Josh and Tim, Martin — the figures about at least two readers per paper, with each reading 24 pages, just seem ridiculous to me, and (I would argue) to anyone who has observed normal human behaviour. I know the two readers (or even three) per paper stat has become commonplace, but that doesn’t make it true — or even believable.

Many papers have zero readers, and even those that have a single reader likely see a tiny fraction of actual pages read. I have no conclusive survey results, obviously, other than 30 years of watching people read newspapers.
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http://nytimes.com/cityroom Patrick LaForge

Actual numbers on age and newspaper readership:

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news

Not a happy story, but not zero, either.
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http://sellingprint.blogspot.com MichaelJ

Given the number of comments, it seems that the meme that “the heart of the problem is news-on-paper” seems to have alot of resonance. It helps clarify for me why the discourse tends to ignore the success of ads-on-paper – shoppers and some community newspapers – that have been doing pretty well.

That meme has the consequence of foregrounding the expense of paper and ignoring the new print technology. It also has the consequence of backgrounding the evolution of journalism in the States as a source of the problem.
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http://drewmack.com Drew

While I still doubt that newspaper’s print editions are outperforming their online equivalents, after working at an newspaper in both their online and offline businesses there would be some really easy explanations to account for them:

1. The print edition is read by a disproportionately high volume of older readers – who will, if you will pardon the bluntness, be dead relatively soon.

2. Online newspapers are, with few exceptions, horrible at building high quality news web sites. It doesn’t surprise me that a company producing a poorly performing print product would have an equally poorly performing web business.

Neither of these explanations suggests that the print edition of the newspaper has any long term future or that it makes for an excellent advertising opportunity unless you’re selling denture adhesives and age defying moisturizers.
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http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/ Martin Langeveld

To re-visiting commenters: Please note that I have added a postscript to the original post.
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Peter James

Green issues with newspapers seems to be ignored?!

I personally think newspapers should be hit with a green tax of paper waste. How many pages in a newspaper are wasteful? Just a big advertisement to fill the space is a prime example.

With an increase of how many pages you have. For example 1-10 pages 2p per page. 11+ x price etc… In truth if I were to pay for a paper that has generalized advertising in, either the advertising should appeal to me or I should be buying a damn good newspaper that actually has worthy stories in.
http://filemagazine.com Beerzie

Great! And my back-of-the-napkin calculations show that only 3% of bad mortgages in the country are actually underwater.
Peter C

What is preventing people from transitioning to online newspapers?
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