Economist deputy editor and digital strategy head Tom Standage writes about the decline of display advertising:
The majority of our revenue (65 per cent and rising) comes from circulation.
We expect display advertising to have pretty much vanished by 2025. We are sorry to see it go – print advertising had very high margins in the past, and extra print pages were almost pure profit for publishers. But those days are never coming back.
Many publishers seem unwilling to accept this, though. They hope to find a way to replace declining print revenues with online advertising.
This is a fantasy, and incumbent print publishers who try to move to a digital-ad model are mostly doomed to failure.
Read more here.
