Newspaper Ads in Deep Decline

Since newspaper advertising has now dropped eight straight quarters, the questions are: How low can it go? And when will it stop bleeding?

American newspaper ad sales dropped another 14 percent in the first quarter of 2008, prompting the questions: How low can it go? And where’s the bottom?

It was the eighth straight quarterly loss and the largest quarterly drop ever recorded by the Newspaper Association of America.

The dollar volume fell to $8.43 billion, which sounds like a lot of advertising—until it is divided among all the nation’s local, regional and national papers.

The decline was led by 35 percent drops in newspaper real estate and job advertising. Those were two of the sectors hardest hit by the nation’s economic slump. But Kip Cassino, a Williamsburg, Va., research director, told Bloomberg News that many of the newspaper losses were caused by advertisers switching dollars to their own websites.

According to Bloomberg, as many papers reported declining circulation, some print advertising dollars were also being diverted to other websites and cable television

Newspaper websites, which are being counted on to balance some of the print losses, attracted $804 million in advertising during the quarter. However, that was far below the billion-plus loss suffered in print ads. The website sales were up 7.2 percent, the smallest increase since the industry started recording the sales in 2004.

The 2008 first quarter newspaper ad losses follow record 9.4 percent losses for all of 2007.