It’s about time to begin writing the obituary for print media now that an authoritative survey of Internet trends finds that Americans devote just 4 percent of their time to print, with Internet and mobile being the places to be.
In releasing “Internet Trends 2015,” the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, known for its investments in Twitter, Google and Waze, shows how important is has become for media groups to shift to the Internet to keep audiences.
It also revealed the rise in mobile usage, which is tied directly to the Internet.
And important for advertisers, it showed that Americans spend an average of 5.6 hours a day on digital devices, double what they did in 2008.
The report from Mary Meeker is a slideshow of the international Internet world that opens with where Americans spend their time and the percent of ad dollars those outlets receive. Print is at the bottom at 4 percent. TV is at 37 percent, down from 43 percent in 2011. Internet is at 24 percent, as is mobile, and radio at 11 percent.
What’s bad for print, according to Joshua Benton, director of the Neiman Journalism Lab and who wrote on the charts Wednesday, is the drop in advertising. He showed charts dating back to 2011 when print still won little attention, 7 percent, but gobbled up 25 percent of ad dollars. That has dropped to 18 percent.
Benton concluded his post with a depressing note he wrote after last year’s survey:
“Print advertising is not coming back. It will fall further. Substantially further. All newspaper planning for the coming few years needs to reckon with that basic fact.
“Mobile continues its rocket rise, and there’s still lots of room for ad revenue growth. And now it’s even eating away at the Great American Time Suck, television. Mobile is eating the world, and most news organizations make only a pittance off it.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
