Report: Newspaper Web revenues to plunge in '09 as audience expands

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on January 16, 2009 at 9:38 PM

U.S. online newspaper revenues fell 2.9 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2008, to US$822 million, according to eMarketer analyst Carol Krol in her latest report. And if that wasn't bad enough, eMarketer predicts online newspaper revenues will continue to slide another 4.7 percent, to $3 billion in 2009, paidContent reported Friday.

However, traffic growth and time spent online continues to climb. Newspaper Web sites counted 68.3 million monthly unique users, or 41.4 percent of all Internet users, in the third quarter of 2008, according to eMarketer, which cites Nielsen Online data.

That increase is a 15.8 percent rise compared to the same quarter in 2007, paidContent reported. Meanwhile, pageviews also grew by 3.51 billion each month in the third quarter of 2008, a 25.2 percent increase over the the same quarter in 2007, Newspaper Associate of America data shows.

Meanwhile, the eMarketer report also estimated that total newspaper advertising revenues were down 16.4 percent to $37.9 billion in 2008, and the research firm predicts that those revenues will continue to fall, to $28.4 billion in 2012, paidContent reported in an article posted by The Washington Post.