“If you look at ad spend by medium in the United States, I pulled this data from the U.S. Statistical Abstract. Of course, the big gorilla in the room is TV. You look at broadcast and cable TV, you’ve got by far the largest expenditure on advertising on those two media. Surprising enough, the next biggest thing is direct mail. Then after direct mail comes the — comes the newspapers. You look at how things have changed over the years, broadcast TV has gone down a little bit. Cable TV has grown by quite a bit, almost a factor of three. The internet’s grown from nothing in 1995 to about 5% of ad expenditures in 2008. And newspapers, As you can see, have contracted from about 23% down to maybe 13% or so. So the big changes are apparent in this diagram. And I guess the next talk is going to be perhaps some more up-to-date figures on the advertising business and newspapers. Newspapers, of course, are still about three times as large in terms of ad revenue as the internet, so there’s still quite a major force in the advertising world.”
- Hal Varian
from Nieman Lab: “Google’s economist-in-chief, Hal Varian, was the keynote speaker this morning at the Federal Trade Commission’s second round of hearings on the future of journalism.” The above is a quote and a slide from that talk. (See more in Nieman Lab’s post).
(DARUSHIMO.com Note: From this point forward, all quotes from anyone who is at the time working at Google will be attributed to “The Google”)
