Nieman Foundation at Harvard
It’s an annual moment of print realism here at Nieman Lab: The posting of the attention/advertising slide from Mary Meeker’s state-of-the-Internet slide deck. It’s enough of a tradition that I can now copy-and-paste from multiple versions of this post. Here’s a sentence from the 2013 version:
For those who don’t know it, Meeker — formerly of Morgan Stanley, at VC firm Kleiner Perkins since late 2010 — each year produces a curated set of data reflecting what she sees as the major trends in Internet usage and growth. It may be the only slide deck that qualifies as an event unto itself.
And a chunk from the 2014 version:
What’s useful about Meeker’s deck is that its core data serves as a punctuation mark on some big, ongoing trends. The kind of trends we all know are happening, but whose annual rate of progress can be hard to judge. Like, say, the continued demise of print.
The Meeker slide that always interests me most is the one where she shows how American attention is divided among various forms of media — and how that division lines up with where advertising dollars go. How much of our attention goes to television, say, versus how much of our advertising goes there?
It’s not absolute dogma that the two — audience attention and advertising dollars — will always be equal. But it makes sense that they would tend toward parity. More people listening to the radio should lead to more companies advertising on the radio, or vice versa.
So let’s travel back in time. Here’s Meeker’s chart for 2011:
The two things that jump out at me: Print gets a lot more advertising than it gets attention. And mobile is the opposite. You’d think that would equalize with time.
Here’s 2012:
Equalization! Or at least the path to equalization, proportionately. Print loses attention, but loses ad dollars a bit more quickly; mobile gains attention, but gains ad dollars a bit more quickly. (Sizable margin of error here, it’s worth saying.)
Here’s 2013:
The print story remains the same: down in attention and in ad dollars. But note there is still a wide gap between the two — print still gets far more ad dollars than its hold on the American attention would seem to “deserve.”
Here’s 2014:
The mobile growth everyone anticipated is happening — moving from 4 percent to 8 percent in 12 months’ time. And print continues to lose both time spent and revenue.
And here’s the new 2015 chart (it’s slide 45):
First: Nice new aquamarine! Maybe Meeker became a Dolphins fan last fall?
On the positive side, print’s share of attention remained steady at 4 percent. You’ll note, though, that when the numbers get that small, you’d need roughly a 25 percent decline in attention share to drop from 4 percent to 3 percent. So steady doesn’t necessarily mean steady — it just means a pace of decline less than that. (And of course we don’t know if that 4 percent is really 3.51 percent of 4.49 percent either.)
The ad-side trend, though, is unchanged — down another two points from 18 percent to 16 percent. And, of course, there’s still a long way to fall from there.
Note, too, that mobile advertising had another huge jump, from 8 percent to 12 percent. But given that 85 percent of all new digital ad revenue goes to Google or Facebook, that money isn’t exactly a boon to publishers.
Let me wrap up by copying what I wrote two years ago, since the overarching trends haven’t really changed since then:
Print advertising is not coming back. It will fall further. Substantially further. All newspaper planning for the coming few years needs to reckon with that basic fact.
Mobile continues its rocket rise, and there’s still lots of room for ad revenue growth. And now it’s even eating away at the Great American Time Suck, television. Mobile is eating the world, and most news organizations make only a pittance off it.
Lots more interesting stuff in Meeker’s complete deck.
5 comments:
It doesn’t seem to be a fair analysis. First of almost all newspapers are paid products. All the others are not. Usually folks receive one newspaper into their household while there are hundreds of tv channels and radio stations…not to mention millions of internet sites to choose from. How can you compare one product to thousands or millions? People don’t watch thousands of internet sites, hundreds of tv channels or listen to hundreds of radio stations at once. They use one of each. Compare the .local newspaper to one tv station in that market, one radio station in that market and one web site in that market. Let’s see what that shows. It will show newspapers have a 40 or 50% or higher coverage in that market. It will show radio has less then four percent, local TV at 13% or less and the web site less than 7%. You need to compare apples to apples.
Mary Meeker’s time spent chart always generates lots of interest but it is a one dimensional analysis. Time spent with media is clearly a factor in deciding where to invest advertising money, but it is only one factor. Time spent does not necessarily represent value in and of itself – it’s the reach, the quality and nature of the audience, their attention and responsiveness to communications that matters.
Most people do not need a long time to interact with an ad. What’s important is finding the most valuable context, where the right audience is highly engaged – content is the true driver or engagement. And in this case, newsbrands aren’t given a particularly fair hearing.
A recent Newsworks and PwC study in the UK, ‘The battle for attention’, found that quality time – that is sustained attention on a single media – drives advertising impact far more than dwell time.
‘The battle for attention’ research found that regular consumers who are fully immersed in a media, such as newspapers, are more likely to respond positively to advertising – defined as consumers’ encouragement to purchase, ideas generation, recall, relevance and trust in advertising – than those who are using multiple media simultaneously.
These findings support WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell’s belief that the quality of time spent needs to be factored in when considering where to place advertising dollars.
In the UK, the Newsworks and PwC study shows that 60% of regular print readers are not consuming any other media at the same time as reading newspapers and for the 40% that do consume other media with print newspapers, it’s most likely to be non-commercial BBC TV and radio – meaning that the only ads people are exposed to are those in the newspaper.
Commenting on the research, Douglas McCabe, CEO and head of publishing and tech at Enders Analysis, said: “Advertising is increasingly being traded on an audience basis, taking too little into account of the respective qualitative strengths of different media experiences. Consumer immersion in trusted content has a massive impact on awareness, trust and effectiveness of its associated advertising. Attention feels an important step in the right direction.”
Read more about the research: http://www.newsworks.org.uk/Topics-themes/the-battle-for-attention/87726
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