Even as digital channels grow in usage, print media remains alive, and its decline has been much slower than many feared – partly thanks to increased circulation revenues.
The lasting impact of print
In PricewaterhouseCoopers’ annual Entertainment and Media Outlook, the firm charted the rise of digital media channels. PwC showed that while revenues from digital newspaper circulation were minuscule in 2008 – with the total value of the U.S. market equaling only $61 million – they have risen steadily since.
That’s a compound annual growth rate of over 35 percent. That doesn’t mean, however, that print circulation is declining accordingly. In fact, PwC found that the print circulation market in the U.S. was worth $78.647 billion in 2008 and $78.353 billion in 2013, and it’s expected to slip to $75.898 billion in the next four years. That’s a CAGR of only 0.3 percent – indicating that consumers are not entirely abandoning newspapers to focus instead on digital channels.
Market forces to watch
PwC explained that a number of market forces have influenced trends in print media revenues in recent years.
The economic crisis of 2009 was one factor driving the slight drop-off in newspaper revenues. As companies began finding themselves with less cash to spend, they began looking for cheaper alternatives to print advertisements. They began using digital channels instead – selling their goods on eBay, using SEO strategies for branding instead of paid print ads and placing Craigslist ads instead of paying for classifieds.
Throughout the rise of the Internet, mobile and new forms of display ads from the late 1990s on, newspaper publishers began to adjust their strategies. They began looking to increase the proportion of their overall revenues coming from single-copy sales and subscriptions, which meant adapting pricing strategies to increase profits. Cover prices began to rise in the U.S., especially for more upscale titles. The overall impact was that revenue from daily newspaper sales ended up “more or less stable through this period,” according to PwC.
This strategy hasn’t worked for everyone. In Canada, for instance, some publishers are still relying primarily on advertising revenue for the time being, although the market for ads north of the border collapsed in the 1990s. Luckily, though, PwC notes that the decline in ad revenue wasn’t nearly as pronounced in Canada as in the U.S. helping the overall decline of print revenues to stay relatively slow through this turbulent economic period.