The trend of newspapers began about 5 centuries ago. It’s considered a dramatic era when the handwritten newsletters in Europe were circulated secretively between merchants sharing all kinds of economic benefits as well as information on wars.
In the English-speaking world, The Weekly News was the first newspaper. It was published in 1622. The first actual newspaper in English language was published in the U.K. called London Gazette in 1666. In the United States, the first newspaper showed up in 1690 in Boston. It was called Publick Occurrences. This newspaper was not authorized to be published and was fiercely suppressed, to the extent that all its published copies were burnt. Finally, postmaster John Campbell published the Boston Newsletter in 1704.
From that time, there had been many newspapers springing up all over the world. By 1880, there were 11,314 newspapers being published across the world. Today, technology has advanced in the form of the Internet and cell phones, and the significance of newspaper has gone down drastically. Since the latest news is being shown on news websites and easily available on the cell phones, people are not buying so many newspapers.
Newspaper revenues have been on the decline in the recent past. The year 2000 saw earnings of $48.67 billion for the newspaper industry. This was when the Newspaper Association of America did not track the revenue that came from online news. It was assumed to be a small number. As 2001 approached, a dramatic dip was recorded in the revenue of newspapers in the U.S. The fall in revenue was as much as 9% every year after 2001. This was the period when the Internet was just gaining pace.
As the years passed by, the popular newspaper The Washington Post recorded a decline of 2.7% in 2005, in relation to its revenue the previous year. Similar was the case of The Wall Street Journal, run by Dow Jones & Co., which saw a dip of 0.8%.
As NAA began regular tracking of the online sales, it was noticed from the year 2002 to 2006, the revenue from print advertising was somewhere along $44 to $47 billion. The total revenue of $49.435 billion was recorded in 2005 from which $2.027 billion was attributed to online sales.
The revenue from conventional printing kept going down from $49.275 in 2006 to $27.564 billion in 2009. The downfall was recorded as a decline of 44.24% in four years. Half of the revenue was sucked in by the online and cell phone industry. The same trend is picking up with the release of new applications for various cell phones and smart phones.
In essence, there’s not just one reason for the decline in newspaper revenues. One of the most striking reasons is the upsurge of free news that’s easily accessible on the Web. Publishers responded by increasing the subscription and newsstand prices to offset the losses. There are other publishers who have terminated newspaper delivery to unprofitable locations. The trend is definitely on the rise and it’s most likely to continue.
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