Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reports that newspapers are likely to generate no more than $28 billion in advertising revenues in 2009, thus shedding more than $21 billion in sales since 2005. Retail advertising is likely to drop this year to $14.8 billion, or 33% less than it was in 2005.
Here’s my two cents added: Google, which gets 97% of its revenue from advertising, reported $16 billion in sales through three quarters, with $6 billion in the most recent quarter. So for the full year, at present rates of growth, Google should rack up about $23-24 billion in sales. In 2005, Google had $6 billion in revenue for the full year.
Assuming the two curves stay on the same trajectory (a fairly realistic assumption), sometime next year, a single information-age company built on a good idea for surfing the web and which has fewer than 100 people involved in the information provision business (largely gathering and disseminating other people’s news), will a short decade after its creation be garnering more advertising dollars than the entire newspaper industry combined.
