Slip in online share

The Wall Street Journal pubished an interesting article last week about the slip in share for local media relative to pure play competion. The money numbers:

Newspapers moved from a 44.1% share to 27.4% while pure play internet companies moed up from 15.3% to 53.3% in the period between 2004 and 2008.

You may be saying that newspapers have been reporting impressive growth in online revenue over the same period, and you would be right in that saying. The issue was that newspaper chose to compare themselves rather than look externally to the emerging competion. The 30-50% growth looked staggering compared to little to no growth in print. However google, local, reach local, marchex and others were growing local at twice that rate (or more)

But newspapers are LOCAL - shouldn't that give them an advantage. No.

Technology can more than make up for that. It's quite trivial to target your adsense ads to a specific community, and ad networks can do the same on the display advertisng side.

There might be some hope for newspapers as they adopt low cost sales methods like the large companies have (read: google). However, they might need to adopt more transparent and performance driven pricing as well.