Thread by @jeffjarvis

New, packed Accenture report on the state of the newspaper business.🧵
Headline to me: Growth in search advertising came from new advertisers (e.g., small biz), directories, trade -- NOT from other media. That is, not from newspapers & magazines.
newsmedia-analysis.com/wp-content/upl… 1/

So newspapers whining that Google stole their advertising (as if God ever gave it to them) and owes them recompense? Not so much. 2/

In the period 2004-2018, newspaper revenue fell from a high of $60b to $27b, a drop of more than half. 3/

Here's the breakdown of newspaper revenue loss. Circ stayed pretty much steady, adding in still-paltry online sub dollars (remember that two-thirds of US online news subs go to three brands; everybody else splits the rest.) 4/

The big hurt, of course, came in classifieds: minus $15.8b. No, that isn't the fault of my friend Craig; no one player below takes all. Much just went away because, as I often say, the net abhors middlemen & newspapers were middlemen charging high prices for monopoly classies.5/

Newspapers went from controlling 81% of classifies to 11%. Accenture emphasizes that the classified *ad* market grew slightly but actually grew more with other business models (e.g., commissions, subscriptions for job seekers). 6/

Newspaper display ads fell for many reasons, but mainly, as I put it, the death of the myth of mass media: that all readers see all ads, so we charge all advertisers for all readers. No more. The net -- not Google or Facebook but the net -- dispelled that myth. 7/

Meanwhile, the total ad market exploded by 40%, from $179.2B to $254.9B. At the same time, newspaper ad revenue fell from $48.2B to $15.1B. That's not because anyone stole anything from them. It's because they didn't adapt; they still acted like monopolies. 8/

Meanwhile, Accenture says, news consumption -- online -- is up; time spent with print newspapers is down by half. 9/

But don't get too excited. Also this morning, Axios reports that traffic to news post-Trump is down, especially at the extremes. The attention-based ad model for news is a highway headed only downhill. 10/

I just read a speech by Whitelaw Reid, editor & publisher of the NY Tribune, in 1879: fascinating, for I saw then the same kind of resistance to change I see now. He said newspapers couldn't take more content (too much time already) or ads (too much paper). 11/

Tweaking old business models to preserve old editorial ways will save no one. We need to rethink the industry fundamentally in a new reality. There are opportunities galore. Lobbying, protectionism, and whining are not models for the future. 12/