What's the future of print?

The shrinking size of the print ad market reveals that many marketers are shifting investment away from news and magazine media, but remaining players may benefit from reduced clutter, a new WARC Media report suggests.

Why it matters

Print remains a mass media, for now, but appears midway through a transition towards being dominated by digital format consumption, especially in North America and Europe. At the same time, newsbrands have looked to diversify away from advertising. For example, The New York Times’ share of revenue coming from print and digital ads dropped from 40.4% in 2015 to 22.6% in 2022. 

Takeaways 

• Global publishing print ad revenue has collapsed from $75.9bn in 2016 to $37.3bn in 2022.
• Globally, print press has the lowest reach of any major channel monitored by WARC Media and GWI. Consumption of print media will be overtaken by both games consoles (68.0%) and podcasts (68.8%) in 2023.
• Consumers in Asia-Pacific remain more committed to publishing media than those in other regions, with a forecasted average daily consumption of more than two hours in 2023.
• But consumption is increasingly dominated by digital formats. In Q3 2022 in APAC, more than half (56.7%) of the time spent with publishing media is expected to be with online, rather than print, content.
• Research by Peter Field and UK trade organisation Newsworks found that newsbrand advertising has a big effect on profitability and contribution to market share growth, and that this effect rocketed after 2016, due to newsbrands’ perceived trustworthiness.

Read more in The Big Picture: Print, from WARC Media