Disqus - Latest Comments for Martin Langeveld

Re: Understanding the fall of Newspapers in revenue numbers

Martin Langeveld — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:24:42 -0000

The only way to look at the numbers that makes any sense is year-over-year, since quarter-to-quarter varies significantly due to the seasonal cycle. I've put these numbers in a 49-year context versus other media on my blog:
http://newsafternewspapers.blogspot.com/2008/11...

Re: The revenue slide gets steeper

Martin Langeveld — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:58:52 -0000

What's even more interesting is if you graph the sales data as a fraction of GDP, rather than in constant dollars. This eliminates the rather illusory peak your chart shows in 2000.

In 1956, newspaper ad revenue hit a post-1949 high of 0.742% (about 3/4 of 1 percent). With the exception of a 5 or 6-year rally during the 1980s, it has been almost constantly downhill ever since. Depending on your guesses of 2008 revenue and final GDP, the 2008 fraction will be at about 0.260% (barely over 1/4 of 1 percent). So in 52 years, newspaper have lost about 2/3 of their GDP share.

Moreover, the current decline looks amazingly like that chart they showed the execs at the API summit a few weeks back: http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/pages/res...

Re: bit.ly blog - Expand URLs and Get Traffic Summaries Before...

Martin Langeveld — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:22:12 -0000

Just weighing in to second Bob Walsh -- this happened on my Blogspot blog too. IE users see a partial load of the blog page, then get an IE error message "Internet Explorer can't open the Internet site, Operation aborted". When they click OK on that message, they lose the page entirely. This will teach me not to download brand new Firefox extensions, I guess.