Vin Crosbie has a fascinating report from Norway, where he’s been talking to online advertisers and others about what’s happening with newspapers.
In In A Land Where Beer is Pronounced URL, Vin produces some interesting stats on the advanced state of online media in a country that has a strong tradition of newspaper readership. He writes:
Dagbladet’s website receives more than 750,000 unique visitors per week and it’s almost entirely domestic traffic. The equivalent number in the US would be 48,806,94. Compare that to NYTimes.com’s 13,372,00 unique users per month.
Dagbladet’s new-media EBITA earnings climbed from 8.5 million to 22 million Kroner (1.3 million to 3.3 million US dollars) between 2004 and 2005. The 2006 increase was at least 40 percent more and forecast to be the same during 2007. The Economist magazine last year reported that VG’s publisher Shibsted earned nearly 40 percent of its revenues from new-media. Dagbladet AS reportedly earned about a third of its that way. New-media will probably contribute more than 40 percent of each companies earnings this year.
It’s difficult to take what’s happening in one country and apply it to another. But what’s happening in Norway — where, despite a strong tradition of newspaper reading, circulation is falling fast and online revenues are rising significantly — reflects what’s happening in the U.S. and Canada. It may be more robust, but the trends are the same.
Crosbie’s report makes for interesting reading, not just for the report from Norway. In it, he promises a coming post on how his thinking about what ails the newspaper industry has changed. The post, he says, will not make journalists or j-schools very happy with him. That I want to read.
TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, ONLINE, NORWAY
