Print News Circulation To Nosedive in Next Few Years
By Anna Johnson on February 2nd, 2010A survey of nearly 2,787 U.S. news consumers by Outsell indicates that U.S. newspapers’ print circulation will continue to decline, with daily and Sunday circulation expected to drop by 3.5 percent annually by 2012.
Additionally, according to Outsell’s third annual News Users’ report, online news aggregators such as Google and Yahoo have continued, and will continue, taking share away from the traditional providers of both print and online news.
In stark contrast to Google’s commonly-used assertion that it sends valuable traffic to news sites, Outsell estimates that 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without visiting newspapers’ individual sites.
The Internet, it seems, is satisfying a widely held demand for ‘instant news’ or what Outsell calls ‘news right now.’ And when U.S. consumers want ‘news right now’, 57 percent visit digital sources and are more likely to go to a news aggregator (31 percent) than a newspaper site (8 percent) or other site (18 percent).
If that shouldn’t worry traditional news publishers enough, Outsell reckons that only 10 percent of news users are willing to pay for a print newspaper subscription to gain online access, and 75 percent would turn to a different source for local online news if their newspapers charged a paid subscription.
Hmmm… so while some newspaper companies start charging for online access to their news in order to boost revenues and cover the costs of their huge fixed cost infrastructures (i.e. printing presses), such moves may only quicken their demise. All it takes is a few clicks for an Internet user confronted with a pay-wall (or other payment requirement) to abandon a newspaper site in favor of a free website where the news is free.
Oh, and in case, anyone brings up the argument that the news is more reliable, trustworthy, extensive, considered, blah, blah at a newspaper site… I don’t buy that any more. The fact is that journalists break news, not newspaper companies, and plenty of journalists can now be found working for the free online news media.
Call them bloggers, reporters, journalists, or whatever you like… but they’re plying their craft online as much as offline these days and we can read much of their news for free.
So how is a traditional newspaper that charges for its online content going to compete, again?
