WORLD PRESS TRENDS - World Association of Newspapers

ADVERTISING
ADVERTISING
Newspaper ad expenditure and newspapers’ share of the ad market
US$ million (current prices)
120,000
100,000
80,000
60,000
40,000
20,000
0
45.0
40.0
35.0
30.0
25.0
%
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
Ad expenditure (left hand scale)
Market share (right hand scale)
Every six months ZenithOptimedia collects advertising
expenditure figures from 57 countries around the world,
including forecasts for the next few years. We estimate
that total advertising expenditure shrank by 3.6% between
2000 and 2002, as companies had to cope with falling
profits and lower expectations of future growth.
Newspaper ad expenditure fell faster: by 7.5%, we
estimate. The downturn hit hardest in the large,
developed ad markets, when the bubbles of exuberance
in the dotcom, IT and telecommunications sectors burst
so dramatically in 2001. Several of the developing markets
escaped the advertising downturn almost entirely. These
smaller markets tend to spend much more on television
and less in newspapers, so their relative strength shifted
a portion of world ad expenditure from the latter to the
former.
Newspapers’ share of the world ad market fell from 32.1%
in 2000 to 30.8% in 2002. This was a particularly sharp
instance of the long decline in newspapers’ market share,
which has been going on for as long as we have been
collecting data. As the above chart shows, however, over
the long term the amount spent on newspaper advertising
has grown quite substantially, if erratically; even after two
years of decline newspaper ad expenditure was higher in
2002 than it was in 1999. Newspapers’ loss of share is
largely the result of the growth of other media, offering
advertisers new opportunities, rather than a decline in
newspapers themselves. During the 1980s and 1990s
television markets across the world deregulated, allowing
television to supply audiences to advertisers more
efficiently. The internet, of course, has created an entirely
new form of advertising, and even outdoor, which may
seem a quintessentially old medium, is improving as
contractors develop new types of display.
Newspapers are innovating too, developing special
sections to capture new readers and provide a platform
for specialist advertisers, and refining their editorial
content and design. Notably, newspapers have made
creative use of the internet to extend their paper activities.
Many have developed large databases of classified
advertising, often in partnership with other newspapers
owned by the same publisher, or with other publishers.
This was partly a defensive reaction to the emergence of
purely online classified advertising, but also a way to
extend the reach and value of their existing classified
advertising businesses, which for many local newspapers
were previously confined to small distribution areas. This
sort of advertising is subsumed within general internet
advertising, not captured in the newspaper ad
expenditure figures cited above, but it provides publishers
with a useful second stream of income and a means to
promote their main paper products.
It is true that newspaper circulation is declining in the
developed world, as we describe later in the ‘Titles and
circulations’ section. But it is growing quite rapidly in
the developing world, which holds most of the world’s
population. There is no sign that overall demand for
newspapers is under any long-term threat, and while
people continue to read newspapers, advertisers will want
to use newspapers to reach them.
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WORLD ASSOCIATION OF NEWSPAPERS - WORLD PRESS TRENDS 2003