Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online
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:
- Newspapers must grow their online news market share. Can they?
- Online newspaper audience growth: Good news? Not really.
________
*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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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
@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…)
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).
$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.
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.
@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?
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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
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.
@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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
@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.
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.
@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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
To re-visiting commenters: Please note that I have added a postscript to the original post.
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.
Great! And my back-of-the-napkin calculations show that only 3% of bad mortgages in the country are actually underwater.
What is preventing people from transitioning to online newspapers?
These numbers don’t explain what is killing the newspaper industry. People are getting their news online. Not by reading newspapers online; but by reading sites like cnn.com, digg.com and reddit.com.
The fact that only 3% of newspaper reading is done online just shows that traditional print media has not figured out how to use the medium effectively.
My local daily newspaper switched to a free delivery model several months ago.
I suspect they count me as a “reader” since they toss a newspaper on my driveway every day.
The important statistic they are missing though is that every paper, without fail, goes directly into the trash can. Oh, sometimes I’ll scan the lead article as I’m strolling to the garbage can, but does that really qualify me as a “reader”?
This is total bs. The only printed publications I read (outside of books) is when I travel on planes. Crap my 80 year old dad only reads on-line newspapers. This story is a total industry plant. If this was the case has the size of my local paper shrunk down to “high school” paper size in the last couple years?
Just a note from someone who is an “older reader – who will, if you will pardon the bluntness, be dead relatively soon”.
Never underestimate the power of the baby boomers.
It turns out we are still in the pig in the python, and our purchasing power is pretty high. Given our over weaning pride we think we’re going to live at least to a hundred. That’s why the health system better be fixed. Besides we’re the ones who buy all the stuff for the grand children. Given the disappearance of I bankers,I’m thinking we’re in a better position to buy expensive stuff, since we don’t have to pay for child care.
I so wish someone who BOUGHT advertising would sometimes join these discussions. Or sold ads.
NAA does fine work, but in this case I’d use numbers from Gordon Borrell or http://www.readership.org/
While I agree the power of online is often greatly over-stated, as is the weakness of print, it seems to me that advertising is moving online because it is the better value than print.
That is to say, businesses are finding that they can more often feel they are doing a better job of creating awareness of who they are and what they sell with online marketing efforts. There is only X amount of money to spend. More are spending it online. (Borrell has the data.)
You have to view this story for what it is: a walled-garden review of the newspaper industry. For the author’s credit, he clarifies this in his update after the fact.
However, a more relevant discussion can be had by asking a few more questions. How many online news consumers get their news from a newspaper’s website? CNN.com is not a newspaper website. Neither is Yahoo or anyone that gets fed by the AP.
The real issue is not the percentage of newspaper readers who consume online. It is the percentage of people who see newspapers as a viable resource.
The majority of newspaper websites I come across are outdated and run by the same publishing practices as their hard-copy counterparts. News is a day old online, which is even more unforgivable than when it comes to my doorstep.
I believe it is a question of culture and understanding. The people who run newspapers have created a deadline-per-day environment that does not translate well Online. Their understanding of news and consumers is based around years and years and years of this culture and this model. Now the web presents them with a massive shift and most of these people will not make the shift themselves. They will hold to the same distribution ideals that have succeeded in the past.
To use myself as an example, I’m very interested in tech news. Do I read the newspaper for that news? No. Do I visit nytimes.com for it? No. I read Gizmodo.com. That site is not included in online newspaper numbers, but it is news nonetheless.
Or how about this very article? Was it printed in a newspaper or an online counterpart to one? Nope, it looks like it was exclusive web content. If it were in a newspaper or a newspaper website, it would have never reached me.
The newspapers who get it right and survive the shift will be the ones who are most flexible. The old adage “content is king” is never more evident than when you see a local paper website that is drowning their viewers in online ads at the expense of content delivery. These are the ones who will not be around in a decade or less.
To sum up, I submit that looking at the newspaper industry in a bubble is fruitless, especially in the context of the Internet. If you’re going to critique news delivery online and not include blogs and other non-newspaper-based sources, you’re going to miss the whole picture. But hey, that’s what most of the papers are doing today anyway. And that’s why they’re shutting down left and right.
I only read the newspaper online, so do most of my friends, my mom and dad and brothers. In my circle I would say that 50% of the people I know now read the newspaper online. This is coming from a paperboy of 7 years.
This is an interesting post, and many people before me have already left comments with views I would like to have shared.
I think there is a lot to learn from this post, especially the drive behind it. But the study still has to be carried out, even accepting that it’s hard to come up with facts when it comes to measuring reading habits, you cannot reach a serious conclusion with “educated guesses” as foundation.
It has to be considered that there are readers who read BOTH media, print and online, and use them in different ways (I am one of them). The reading processes and habitus are not exclusive.
Also, newspapers’ editorial responsibility in deciding what kind of content they are publishing has to be considered as well: in Britain at least the “twitter-ization” of print journalism has produced un-interesting, banale short pieces suited for the most basic, shortest and distracted of attention spans. Some readers may not be reading newspapers anymore because the features are becoming more and more mediocre. Some people won’t read news online because some are worse than the online ones.
I am no expert in the field but there MUST be scholarly research on the relations/differences between webometrics and periodicals reading metrics. There has to be a more “objective” way of measuring the different newspaper reading habits of the 21st century.
That’s it. Keep deluding yourselves, PrintNewsCompany. Right into bankruptcy court.
Hi. I will get to the point of my comment. I’m retired so I have the time to read. If I bought the newpapers and magazines I read on line it would cost me around twenty plus dollars a day. In these economic times reading on line is a blessing for me and many others.
Don’t have to get dressed, buy gas, find a place to park,etc. And my mailbox would not hold the papers and magazines I read.
Delusional.
That is not a realistic number. How many WW2 vets did you survey?? Did you do your survey at a retirement home???
They will let ANYONE into Harvard these days.
Was there even a survey?
In London you could more or less “guess” that people spend at least 10 minutes viewing the free newspapers because that would be the minimum commuting time on the bus or the tube. But these papers are free, and offer a different set of problematics than newspapers that have seen their subscription base reduced.
In short, I just think that no conclusion can be drawn from these calculations, even if you modify the figures again and again.
It’s not about guesswork, it’s about bibliometrics, infometrics, statistics, quantitative research.
People are getting more and more of their news from the internet. My generation, under 30, rarely gets any of its news from an actual print version of the news paper. Personally, I haven’t read a news paper in about six years and prior to that I only used the news paper for job listings or finding stuff in the classifieds. With craigslist and other similar auction sites I have almost no need for the newspaper. I do however, pickup the occasional whitesheet that lists cars and other similar classified types of items.
Surprise!
This is the most slipshod piece of reporting I have ever read!
First of all, 24 pages of average page reads per day! I know people that RUN news organizations who don’t read more than three! Why? Because a newspaper is YESTERDAY’S NEWS!
What about all those passalongs? Do you realize they are taking credit for copies of USA Today left on airport chairs at the departure gate? Two pages, tops!
Find me someone that still reads 24 pages of a daily newspaper everyday and I will show you someone with nothing to do all day. No one has the time for that anymore. This generation spends more time on Facebook than they do reading a newspaper!
The newscycle has sped up and newspapers can’t keep up. Forget the internet. I knew newspapers were dead the first time I saw CNN. Live breaking news on your TV! Yes! Now we’re talkin… Now you might say that that does not give one an ‘in-depth’ view of the news.
Perhaps, but now everything is online. Besides, the word seems more interested in bits and bites than they ever have before. Blame MTV. Blame TMZ, but kids today want their news in three minute bits. Try getting THAT toothpaste back in the tube!
I read a newspaper about once a week for 5 minutes and I am one of the most informed people I know.
Why? Because I spend hours reading and researching material online. It’s all there, with a Google map to boot!
While your motives may be pure, your ‘facts’ are anything but. To put this kind of guesstimate story out there is a disservice to your readers and as it will no doubt be referenced further down the line, should be an embarrassment to Harvard University.
@Jerry et al: Rant at will, but look: I based this on a whole lot of solid data and a couple of reasonable assumptions. Change those assumptions if you like, but it won’t change the conclusions, I’ve explained why.
What I have NOT done is thrown in anecdotal observations about newspapers left unread on chairs, 80-year old dads who get their news online, and the like, and drawn global conclusions from that.
Yes, many people no longer read newspapers the way the used to. The point is, those people are NOT migrating to newspaper web sites.
Newspapers need to get away from page views. Websites cared about page views in 1995. You need to focus on engagement: If I flip casually through 10 newspaper print pages only to find 1 story I like, is the page view really a valuable metric? Conversely, what if I looked at 1 online page view (because online I can skip the crap I’m not interested in and go right to the story/page I want), and then posted it on my Facebook profile, where it was viewed by 5 friends who share my interests? Aren’t those 6 total page views more valuable because they represent people who ACTIVELY pursued a specific story/page, and who ACTIVELY recommended and shared it with others in their social circles?
Utterly ridiculous. Of course people are not moving from printed newspapers to online newspapers in massive numbers. Why on earth would they?
They’re moving to an entirely different way of consuming news, one which exactly 0% of the newspaper publishers are catering to.
I used to be subscribed to 3 different newspapers. That was years ago. These days, I only visit a newspaper website if a specific article shows up on my radar. I still read as much as I used to, I’m not a techno-fetishist, I still read lots of books (real ones, not Kindle). If you’re one of those people who still wants a newspaper in the 21st century, print is still very convenient.
But as far as I’m concerned, news via a newspaper, online or offline is very, very limited way of consuming news. Print isn’t dead yet, but the newspaper paradigm soon will be.
Assuming every paper is read by 2+ people at 24 pages per person 7 days a week, 365 days a year, as just a “guess” is completely laughable. Math fail
People, notice the last paragraph in the post..
“**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.”
Readers spent time. That does not meant “readers” read anything. It means the paper was in the scanner’s environment for 30 minutes ,etc., etc..
People don’t read news. They scan headlines. The3y do the same on the web. Info junkies search and read. Info junkies are a very small niche market. Sorry folks, but there it is.
One problem with this discussion is that it is self-selected for info junkies. But for most people, most of the time, no news is good news.
Sports? puzzles? ads? a little gossip? something to read, fold and throw away. That’s what a newspaper has been since Hearst invented the modern newspaper.
As for “This generation spends more time on Facebook than they do reading a newspaper!” Sorry, but in the global scale of things, this generation is also just a niche audience. If it’s reasonable to infer that “this generation” means urban info junkies, it’s even a smaller niche with a global perspective.
As for “That is to say, businesses are finding that they can more often feel they are doing a better job of creating awareness of who they are and what they sell with online marketing efforts.”
I am assuming you mean at the top of the pyramid or for a special niche. Supermarkets? Local plumbers and accountants? Handymen? Most of the entreprenuerial efforts in the not-intellect workers? Not so much.
With all due respect, I’m still hearing the vision from the bubble. “People like me x, y, z…” Maybe that’s one of the deep problems of journalism in the first place.
Nice photo. I had about 50 people send me a link to this article before I knew about it.
If by chance you use one of my photos again, it would be nice to have an advanced notice just as courtesy. Nevertheless, thanks for the attribution, and great article.
best,
Dustin Diaz
I am glad I found this post. Some thoughts.
There is plenty of “information” online. That is not to say that it is all “news” in the sense of true journalism. But it doesn’t cost the reader a penny. I do think that this is a big reason why newspaper subscriptions have declined steadily. To get headlines, sports scores and the like, why pay for it?
Those of us used to buying a paper could perhaps have or have been migrated to an online, paperless but paid version. Why? For the content, not all of it to be sure but a good portion.
And papers are not “old” news. If by news people think of only today’s headlines, sure I can get that from loads of places. What good newspapers do have are good journalists who do investigative reporting that have an impact on our society and government. And at the moment the bulk of these journalists are getting paid by the newspaper industry and not the CNNs. It is the work of many regional reporters that gather steam and attract the eyes of the big dailies. My paper has the reporters that have chronicled the failure of the FDA to regulate BPA in thousand of household products. http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/34405049.html There is a cost to provide this and I can only hope that the industry figures out how to “monetize” good journalism. They are just so far behind, the question is can they find the new business model in time. I cannot see every great objective reporter creating their own on-line news forum and creating a mini-”paper” online ads and all. Or even doing a collective. They will starve first.
Advertisers will follow news, whatever the medium. It does not have to be newsprint. They still need to get in front of our eyeballs. (But bathroom readers of any age will have a problem.)
So, newspapers still have an audience. They just need to figure out how to migrate from paper (it will happen and some of us will miss being able to NOT look at a screen for a few minutes a day) and get paid for content generation. Distribution will be through people like us through channels we have today and those that are being sketched on the back of a napkin right now.
Maybe they should look at Google. They may have hit on a way to get music into China (where no one pays for downloads) and split ad revenue with the record labels. Another industry that did not manage the transition well. http://www.suntimes.com/news/world/1502279,w-google-music-china-033009.article
Good piece. The number I’d question is print audience reading 24 pages / day / paper. But that’s quibbling. Even if that half that or a quarter of that, the numbers are in the favor of print.
Martin – well done for plowing thru the numbers, caveats and all.
My minor quibble, which may have been addressed by others, is that average reading speed works out at 250-300 words per minute, which means a 25 minute average reading time gives you 6,250-7,500 words.
A freesheet may average 600 words a page, but an NYT well over double that. But with reading speeds, it still doesn’t give you many pages actually read…
I keep coming back here because the discussion is really interesting. It’s also part of my own research.
In a medium in which a lot of people have acritically accepted that “print is dead,” it’s refreshing to hear the hypothesis that “people” are still “reading” “newspapers”.
Now, I’ve used the inverted commas to refer to one of the reasons why this post is so polemical: a) who are this “people”? where do they live, how much do they earn, what language(s) do they speak/read/write on, what do they do for a living? b) what do we mean by “reading” and how do we measure that? What are the conceptual differences between reading/scanning/viewing, and what about the other uses newspapers have, like crosswords/event listings/local classifieds/coupons/especial offers et cetera? c) exactly what kind of newspapers are we talking about? Unless this is isn’t clarified properly, the assumptions and conclusions will remain vague and debatable.
We are reading this on site from The Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, so we are expecting top-notch research here. Lots of people will already be citing you and your conclusions as I write this. Those in infometrics now of ego-centered citations (Corin and Shaw 2002) and of the errors caused by the citation of incorrect statistics (Ho 2004; Fenton et al., 2000). This post must have already been cited here and there, but the accuracy of the data and conclusions it gives still has to be debated properly. You say:
It’s that “couple of reasonable assumptions” that question the accuracy of your conclusions, even if they are changed. I am surprised to see you are not willing to interrogate your own conclusions: you seem unreasonably convinced your “solid data” is the correct one and that your “assumptions” are correct no matter how much they are changed. In academia you should be willing to change your assumptions and your conclusions. That’s what research is for.
I may agree with what seems to be your two main points (people still read newspapers and newspaper readers are not migrating to online newspapers), but I disagree with your unwillingness to accept that bibliometric and infometric research is not carried out by “getting out your spreadsheets and calculator out” and calculating random data from only one source and “a couple” of your own personal -and apparently unquestionable- assumptions.
I personally may read the print newspaper for the amount of time (or the double of time/or half that time) you suggest, but that does not make your assumption correct or valid for coming up with accurate statistics.
I honestly think you should consider the assumptions you have that are not quantitative. The errors I see here are not about numbers, but about concepts. Why would newspaper readers migrate to online newspapers? Why would the notion of “content” remain uncontested, and why would both media remain treated as analogous, when they have been, can and perhaps should be treated as different media for different purposes?
Apologies for the long comment.
Martin,
Congrats on a thought-provoking post. Clearly you’ve stirred up a lot of thought here.
The one fact that keeps nagging at me is this one: 87 billion monthly pages divided by 300 million means that ON AVERAGE every single man, woman and child in the United States would have to read nearly 10 pages a day, every day to reach these numbers.
How is that possible?
@Mo,
Interesting post, but I think by not clarifying the role of news-on-paper, there is a blind spot for a very clear business model that is proven and eminently clear.
“They just need to figure out how to migrate from paper (it will happen and some of us will miss being able to NOT look at a screen for a few minutes a day) and get paid for content generation.”
As long as the focus is “migrating from paper”, it’s going to be harder and harder to find the business model.
Journalists have to face the fact that mass circulation is not built on “news.” While that is the primary focus of journalism, it is not the basis of a mass market product.
Since at least Hearst and the steam driven printing press, news-on-paper is first and foremost a product manufacturing business. The product is an advertising medium. The purpose of news for that product is to attract a niche audience. The sports news consistently attracts the biggest niche market. Crosswords, book reviews, Wednesday coupons for the supermarket,and gossip all attracted different niches.
The mass audience was an aggregation of all these niches. Using legacy print technology it was forced to be a “one size fits all” that hopefully has at least one or two items of interest for everyone.
News-on-paper as a manufactured product will most likely move to the same business model as other manufactured products – mass customization. The same thought model that allowed Dell to mass customize computer product is now available to newspapers to deliver less irrelevant content to interested niches directly. Sports news on the front page to some. Supermarket coupons to others.
And even long form investigative reports for still others.
Meanwhile, the physical newspaper product is still the best media for local advertising for small, medium business. Given that the globals are now moving on, there is a huge presently under served market of SMB that needs to advertise.
The business problem for the product is that the process of ad buying is not built nor priced for SMB. There are any number of community papers and shoppers that have solved that problem and are doing quite ok.
Whether journalism can continue to be supported by the excess revenue of news-on-paper advertising is a much bigger problem. I think if hyperlocal reporting is delivered in hyperlocal print it would naturally garner hyperlocal advertising and all the incentives would be aligned.
@EP,
I think most of your argument is spot on. Journalists approach the business question from their own point of view and background the important issues you raise.
But we must part ways when you say “We are reading this on site from The Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, so we are expecting top-notch research here.”
Systematic well supported research is just one of the things I expect from Harvard, or any other serious academic endeavor.
At least as important is the ability to have thought provoking, well moderated conversations about important topics of the day. In that regard, the site and especially this post succeeds admirably.
You say “but the accuracy of the data and conclusions it gives still has to be debated properly”. No doubt. One hopes that experts with the time, talent and focus will engage in that debate.
But the job of this site is to start uncomfortable discussions. Given the evidence here, the number of link backs and the number of comments there is considerable evidence that job has been well done.
The issue is not an “unwillingness to interrogate your conclusions.” That’s a job for a community of researchers. If you could provide appropriate links to ongoing research in informatics and biometrics that would be much appreciated.
But to be clear, the job here is to point to an issue that is worth the effort. Challenging the print is dead meme is most definitely worth the effort.
Thank you, Martin.
I apologize for three comments in a row, but I just found this article at Terry Wheaton’s blog about local media.
IMHO, it’s a must read to articulate the journalism
vs newspaper conundrum.The title is Deconstructing Professional Journalism
http://www.thepomoblog.com/archive/deconstructing-professional-journalism/
@ Michael,
Thank you for your reply. You are right, the post has succeeded in allowing the discussion of a topic that has remained largely uncontested, or surrounded by an aura of mythology. I also thank Martin for making this discussion possible by posting his article.
What I meant is that the niemanlab.org URL gives this post an academic/journalistic authority that a personal weblog would not have. Unfortunately in my opinion -and other commenters seem to share it, at least in part- though starting the debat is indeed important, the post does more than that, and states authoritatively that “print is king.” This resembles the all-too-familiar journalistic device of sensationalizing and issue to attract readers.
I want to emphasize that I want to believe that print is indeed still king when it comes to newspapers, and although I welcome -as I said before- the sparking of the debate I firmly believe that the “couple of assumptions” in which the conclusion that “print is king” is grounded on have to be reformulated, not merely by changing the figures, but by obtaining said figures through a different, more objective or at least scholarly, method.
If the post were titled “Is Print Still King?”, it would have probably not been as attractive to many people seeking quick solutions, but at least it would indicate an openness to discover different answers than the ones with which the research started. There is no point in engaging in research when the answer is already known and we suit the research method to reach them and prove them right.
I am not working on newspapers specifically, so I am afraid I largely ignore the infometrics/webometric research work on this area, but on the field of infometrics in relation to scholarly production (i.e. academic and scientific journals) I would recommend this as a starting point.
Best regards.
Sorry, the link didn’t work. Let’s try this.
I hope it works.
On the common mistake of thinking it’s just a question of “migrating” paper to digital media, see Sellen and Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office, Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2003. For an example of how to work with samples and come up with credible statistics, see chapter 3, “Paper in Knowledge Work” (2003: 52-73) and chapter 4, “Reading from Paper” (2003: 75-105).
@ EP
This is actually an integral element of what is called “design thinking.” An overview of this sometimes overlooked discipline can be seen at Chris Obrien’s post at the Next Newsroom http://www.nextnewsroom.com/profiles/blogs/redesigning-journalism-with
@MichaelJ,
Way back there you referred to Boomers as the pig in the python. That assertion is no longer entirely accurate. At a “raw number” level, GenY (aka Millenials, aka iGen, aka Digital Natives – b. 1985 – 2005) is almost exactly the size of the Baby Boom (b. 1945 – 1965).
In terms of percentage of population at the end of the cycle (ie, boomers as % of population in 1965), Boomers were a more pronounce bump that GenY as a % of total population in 2005.
As of today, Boomers are more or less equal to people 4 – 24 years old. With every passing day, the Boomers get smaller as a group and the GenY group pushes farther into the workforce.
It’s true that the Boomer/senior demographic has enormous buying power, but (insane as this may sound) that doesn’t necessarily float an advertiser’s boat. Many advertisers express a desire to reach a young demographic who have not yet developed loyalty to a brand or whose brand loyalties can be shifted.
Also, I can’t believe I’m the only person who has an issue with Nielsen. Their number is opaque and therefore bogus.
@ frymaster,
Thanks for the reality check on the numbers. That makes sense.
But here’s my quibble about advertising:
“It’s true that the Boomer/senior demographic has enormous buying power, but (insane as this may sound) that doesn’t necessarily float an advertiser’s boat. Many advertisers express a desire to reach a young demographic who have not yet developed loyalty to a brand or whose brand loyalties can be shifted.”
So my bet is that when the story has to turn from “growth” fueled by funny money and mommy’s credit card, into “profits” fueled by savings and real money, I would not be surprised to find that particular “insanity” will go the way of the other “insanities” that we are now working through.
I sell online newspaper advertising 5 days a week in various parts of the country for community newspapers circulating 20k or less per day. I have also sold print newspaper advertising as well. I love the printed newspaper….but it is a majority of 40+ plus years of age persons who still consume their news in print (from my experience in dealing with clients). And even the clients I deal with who are 40+ know they can get more bang for their advertising buck when trying to reach the 40 and under crowd by advertising online. The newspaper company I work for has a great online audience and a great website platform designed by Zope. The biggest kicker for online readership is content, several community newspapers deliver their content poorly online. Updating only once a day and when they update only teasing the reader with a partial article thinking they will buy the next days print edition. I hate this method of trying to drive readers to print, it is pointless and actually makes most readers mad enough to avoid the paper in all forms. To make online advertising worthwhile newspapers have to focus on the editorial side and keeping it up to date at a minimum 1/2 hour basis. Only then can a local advertiser’s dollars on a local newspaper site really go to work for them. As far as print readers vs. online readers, I think this story is “hog wash.” I ask all of the clients I meet with (at least 22 per week minimum, and that’s just in person) what they do and I find that on average 1 out of 3 read their local newspaper online. Comparing local online newspapers to national news sites is not comparing apples to oranges, a national news site is not going to tell you what happened down the street. What happened down the street is why people read the local newspaper, no matter what form they read it in. Local printed papers are not dying, local online papers are growing!
In my last post I meant to say “apples to apples”. Read it and you’ll see.
I’ve got a feeling that the future of newspapers physically may be electronic ink, such as the Amazon Kindle. I’ll have to find something to put in the bottom of the bird cage, but hauling bags of newsprint to the curb for recycling seems wasteful. Most newspapers never get to the curb. They go in trash bins and into the landfills. With the new emphasis on going green, I’ve got a feeling that the couple hundred year old print paradigm is going out of favor fast.
More importantly, content needs to move to a Web 2.0 model with instant updates, user interaction, filters, and email alerts on favored news stories, crime and weather alerts. Right now there is a crying need for some medium to become the go-to source for everything that is going on locally. The TV stations are making a half-hearted effort. This could be the future of newspapers, but they’ll need to step up and start hiring more tech savvy people and start thinking online rather than on driveway delivery.
@Casey,
Maybe but . . .breaking news went to TV starting in the 70’s. Now breaking news is on the web. But do masses of people really want breaking news? I don’t think so. I think for the mass audience no general news is good general news.
As for time spent with the paper, ever look at the stats for the average time spent on a website? Got keep in mind that info junkies are a niche audience.
Local business needs to reach everyone in the local region. It’s not going to happen on the web.
My journalism class has been focusing on this point for the last couple of months. Many people are convinced that all news will be put online and that print journalism will no longer exist. I have always found this hard to believe, and your data seems to support my thoughts.
People like the idea of having something in their hands, “proof of purchase” some would say. They like the aspect of having an object in their hands that they purchased.
Also, at this time there are still people who are not computer savy. My father can’t even figure out how to turn one on, let alone read the news. There are many more people like him out there who cannot use a computer. It is the same generation that reads the newspaper daily.
It will take many years for online news will be able to catch up with print journalism
You suggest the industry printed 190 billion pages with 9 million metric tons of paper. That’s 21,111 pages per metric ton (190,000/9). Since there are 2205 pounds per metric ton, that’s about 10 pages for each pound of paper (21,111/2205). I don’t think paper is that dense. Thus, your page count (190 billion) seems too low. (I think there are 50 pages per pound of paper, suggesting there are closer to 950 billion pages a year, or 190 billion x (50/10))
Looking at this another way, 190 billion pages a year is about 520 million pages a day (190B / 365). With US circulation of about 50 million, that’s only 10 pages per paper per day. Again, this makes your page count of 190 billion seem too low. (Maybe 5x too low?)
Just a thought.
Jason, here’s the math, I think you left out the conversion to monthly.
9 million tons of paper per year x 2205 pounds per ton x 101 broadsheet pages per pound = 2.004 trillion pages per year. Divide that by 12 = 167 billion pages per month. I rounded that up to 190 billion to account for tabloid publications in the mix.
This article is useless. The numbers, accurate or not-so-accurate, reflect the larger truth: online newspapers suck. So do online magazines. They will NEVER get read until the media companies that publish them realize that YOU CANNOT USE THE PAPER-BASED PARADIGM ONLINE. You must re-design the layout, the UI, the interaction to accommodate the digital platform and the audience under 30 years old that doesn’t care if you go out of business.
Publishers who ignore this do so at their own peril.
I work for a company that facilitates ad sales in print media, and part of our business is a performance-based print advertising service. Publications get paid by advertisers on a per-response, per-lead or per-sale bases; i.e. each time a reader of a publication responds to an ad in the publication running it, that publication gets paid. We’ve seen so far that readers are still extremely responsive to print media – not only from the number of responses but with the detail they pay attention to the advertisements. Print still engages readers and is a very effective ad medium.
I know what I would want – look at the headlines that you want to read and you come across during the day using links passed/forwarded by acquantiances, contacts, friends, RSS readers, etc. and use tools like instapaper to mark what you want to read later and use home-staying e-reader device like a Sony ebook reader or Kindle to fetch those items and read at leisure. Or you could have those items of interest custom printed at your local kinko’s (using the same typeset as that of the printed newspaper/magazine) like a readers digest as nothing can beat the feel of paper reading.
You really think that most readers read a full 24 pages of the newspaper? That sounds pretty absurd to me. They might skim the headlines on 10-20 pages, but the amount they actually read is nowhere near 24 pages. Maybe 4 on average I would guess. That’s one of the benefits of the online medium, if you are actually viewing a page, it is most likely because you read an article title that actually interested you rather than skimming headlines across 10 pages of a newspaper, most of which may not interest you. And that benefit and always on access is one of the reasons online is killing print.
I simply want a newspaper that I can trust as a newspaper. The Washington Post has crossed the boundary from a family newspaper to a full time propaganda arm of the Democrat party
why are most newspapers struggling?
Then why Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes online starting last 17th Mac 09?
Online news works for Internation or postgraduate students, or people who work on job rotations who live away fr their hometown & misses local news. Some would want other than news like BBC, CNN which are more ‘appealing’ then their local news provider. Some are great fans of clubs like soccer…MU fans that go across geographical area to seek for news!
Most bullshit analysis ever! Your metrics are totally irrelevant. Minutes spent reading and page views are a completely irrelevant way of comparing these two media.
Newscorp reported a 97% drop in profits in 2008 and newspaper companies have reported similar drops on the whole since 2001.
Your comparison may be valid for people who go directly to a news website homepage and browse several articles (similar to how people utilise the paper medium). However most people link directly to a particular article of interest online.
The only way to compare is how many people read at least one article in a newspaper vs how many people read at least one news article online. Pages and time spent are bullshit metrics for comparison of these two media.