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

The Internet, though, is a world of abundance, and there is a new power that matters: the ability to make sense of that abundance, to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack. And that power is held by Google. Thus, while the audiences advertisers crave are now hopelessly fractured amongst an effectively infinite number of publishers, t... See more

The second generation of digital media startups began to finally unbundle the newspaper and move away from ads:

One argument is that pre-internet, journalists had a more reliable source of revenue, enabling them to do more investigative work, and the business model shift to online advertising meant they'd now have to produce popular pieces more frequently.

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.

I have seen no reliable studies that look at just how much of Facebook's engagement is actually going to traditional newspapers, but it's probably much lower than what we think. So, let's assume that 2% of Facebook's total activity in the US goes to newspapers in a comparable way to how we would define it in the past.

Now we are down to $300 million... See more