“For the newspapers who are still stubbornly persisting to hang on to print and not gradually move their advertisers to online, they will painfully die an agonizing death in the near future.”
It’s too late for the big newspaper publishing empires. They’re going to die an agonizing death whether they go digital or not. All the good online real estate has already been grabbed by ebay, craisglist and google 13 years ago. Why on earth would an online user or advertiser go to some local dipshite website to read ads, find goods, or find sevices when they can do their one-stop shopping at ebay, craigslist, google, etc.?
Not to mention online revenues per ad are infinitesimal compared to print ads because: 1) online ad space is essentially infinite, driving cost per ad close to zero, and two 2) newspapers only achived high ad rates to start with because they had a local market monopoly on information exchange which has been broken by the Internet, which has an inherent readership scope approaching infinity.
I don't know right off hand but it's working. If I can find some numbers I'll post them, but there is exponential circulation growth at online, small town newspapers. Probably because of the LOCAL aspect/Facebook. If an advertisers just gets a very small .02% return out of how many X impressions that KILLS print advert numbers!! Big Time! Small town 20k circ can not compete with 800K viewers. No way, no how!!
Not to mention online revenues per ad are infinitesimal compared to print ads because:
It's "IMPRESSIONS and VIEWS." That's what counts online per month. As ad revenue counts, it's really no different than print other than being cost effective for the advertisers. The same revenue can come in no matter what if the paper is smart about it. It's being proven every day cost wise.
These dinosaurs just have their heads up their asses because they want to hang on to what they perceive as "purity" print. They can not stand the fact the Avg Joe can get a blog and balance out their B.S. or post news locally before one of their pampas-ass writers drags their feet to investigate.
I don't think Print will ever totally go away, but it will most certainly be back burner material in the next 5-10 years, if not sooner.