A Deeper Dive Into What Really Damaged Newspapers - A Media Operator

Newspaper revenue really started to collapse well over a decade ago, and we've been discussing what to do about it for almost as long.

None of the issues have changed much: newspapers had an oligopoly of attention and an oligopoly of a certain kind of advertising reach, and the internet removed both of these.

Imagine a world where you didn’t have all of that fixed costs. As Benedict Evans says, these newspapers are “a specialised (sp) light manufacturing industry, that aggregated attention to sell advertising.”

At a time when Google, Facebook and Amazon capture up to 70% of all ad dollars generated in the US and newspapers across the country have shed half their journalism jobs since 2008, you may think only a masochist would make a career in ad-supported media right now.

What changed was the feed, something uniquely enabled by digital. Whereas a newspaper had to be defined up-front, such that it could be printed and distributed at scale, a feed is tailored to the individual in real-time — and so are the advertisements. Suddenly it was print that was worth pennies, while the Internet generally and mobile especially ... See more