Graph from Carpe Diem used with permission.
If you want a picture of what utter collapse in an industry looks like, check out the graph above from Professor Mark Perry on employment in the newspaper industry.
From a peak of 457,800 in 1990 to 180,100 in July 2016 is a drop of 60.7%.
Advertising dollars are doing the same thing. On 4/30/15, Prof. Perry published the following graph in his post, Creative Destruction: Newspaper ad revenue continued its precipitous free fall in 2014, and it’s likely to continue:
Graph from Carpe Diem used with permission.
By the way, if you need a quick lesson on the difference between its and it’s, check out the headline of his post. There is soooo much to learn from the professor!
Print advertising revenue has dropped from $67B in 2000 to $16.4B in 2014, a drop of 76%. Add in digital advertising and the drop is to $19.9B, which is still a 72% drop.
The lesson he draws from that collapse in ad revenue:
The dramatic decline in newspaper ad revenues since 2000 has to be one of the most significant and profound Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction in the last decade, maybe in a generation. And it’s not even close to being over.
Technology has brought massive creative disruption to newspapers and publishing.
The flipside of the impact in publishing is that it is astoundingly easy for an unknown author to publish books. I’ve put three books in print electronically (and in paper) at a fraction of the time and with a teeny tiny fraction of the cost of the three books I printed in paper.
There are massive, wide open frontiers to explore, if you wish to do so.
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