There's long been a vague, dearly held hope among newspaper executives that they would somehow be able to replace their plummeting print ad revenue with rising online ad revenue. Bad news, suckas; there's just too much internet out there.

Nat Ives breaks down the current newspaper advertising picture, and the trend is what you would expect, unless you're a newspaper executive: although newspapers are widely read online, their overall share of the online ad market is being inexorably eroded by the flood of online-only news competition. "Newspapers' share of digital ad revenue has fallen from 16.2% in 2005 to 11.4% last year and is heading for 7.9% in 2014, according to the new entertainment and media outlook from PricewaterhouseCoopers."

This trend will continue until newspapers settle into a new, much smaller niche, and their staffs will be drastically cut, though the demand for original journalism will keep them in existence, albeit in a diminished way, the end.
[Ad Age. Pic: Shutterstock]