Is the newspaper advertising slump about to end? Nope. But it’s continuing to get a little bit less awful.
A survey of some of the remaining analysts covering the industry, as well as people who actually work in it, concludes that Q3 ad revenue will be down 25 percent. Awful by any standard except those of this year: Q1 was down 28.3 percent and Q2 was 29 percent.
Here comes the battle the online ad business has been dreading: Congress is drawing up a bill that would require users to sign up to let advertisers track their online behavior–and, if you believe online publishers, more or less destroy the online ad business.
Amazon’s Kindle gets many plaudits, but it also gets one consistent criticism: Why can’t it come with a color screen? It can, say the folks at Pixel Qi, a start-up based in Silicon Valley and Taiwan: It could use the cheap, lightweight color screens that we’re going to make.
Don’t want to pay $1 for a song on iTunes? Try $80,000 a pop. That’s what a federal jury in Minneapolis has told a woman to pay the music industry for illegally downloading 24 songs, bringing her total bill to $1.92 million. Her response: “Good luck trying to get it, because you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”
I’m still not exactly sure why Google has become the chief suspect in the “Who Killed Newspapers” investigation playing out before our very eyes. Because it’s quite clear to me that the real baddie here is bespectacled, mild-mannered Craig Newmark, whose eponymous free service blew up the industry’s most profitable line of business: classified advertising. Here’s the argument in line-graph form.
The newspaper industry wants help from Washington. But it’s not going to get it anytime soon. That’s the takeaway from a Congressional hearing yesterday, where some industry executives pleaded their case–specifically, that they need a change in antitrust law to survive. But if they were thinking that the Obama administration would be receptive to that sort of thing, they got a swift rebuke.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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