Times are tough down under. Embattled traditional media outlets in Australia are being beaten in the struggle for advertising revenue by online media companies.
Where once classified advertisements were rivers of revenue that sustained print titles for almost two centuries, they are now more commonly found at specialist sites that are presenting a serious challenge to newspaper’s position in the advertising market.
According to the Commercial Economic Advisory Service of Australia, 2012 is the first year in which online ad spend in Australia overtook that of newspapers. The dominance of new media companies focused on the sale of classified ads online, in particular Carsales.com, recruitment site SEEK, and real-estate site REA, contributed greatly to the change, which saw the online market receive 27 per cent of the country’s total advertising dollars. Newspapers attracted 24 per cent.
Reuters reports that the shift in advertising dominance from traditional media to online companies is a relatively new phenomenon in Australia. As recently as April the value of traditional media organisations was greater than that of online companies, but in the intervening months the worth of newspaper outlets and television broadcasters plummeted.
