News by the ton: 75 years of US advertising — Benedict Evans

US advertising has shrunk by a third as a share of GDP. This is some combination of internet advertising being vastly cheaper and vastly more efficient on one hand, and on the other a lot of recategorisation. If a car dealer used to buy a 20 page ad insert in their local paper, but now pays for one Google search ad (and how many people bid against ... See more

Stepping back, though we should probably ask where all these ad budgets are coming from, and, more importantly, where the growth for internet advertising will come from next. The obvious answer is television: print is mostly already gone, but ‘TV’ viewing is now finally unlocking, with US pay TV subscriptions now down by over a third 

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.

Meanwhile, Google and Facebook created huge new ad businesses on the internet, that advertisers prefer, and some newspaper companies think that somehow or other they should get some of that money.

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.

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.

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