Not unlike the misery that has befallen the traditional newspaper publishers here in the U.S., where the percentage of adults who report
reading daily newspapers has fallen from 81 percent in 1964 to just 52
percent in 2004, China's newspapers are also struggling.
The South China Morning Post reported recently that a Chinese government backed think tank suggest that the Chinese newspaper industry has entered an "ice age".
Some key facts from the article:
- Newspapers' continuous revenue growth of the past two decades halted early last year under pressure from online services.
- Average advertising revenue in the traditional print-media industry declined for the first time last year, shrinking by at least 15 percent compared with 2004.
- In contrast, Internet media flourished, earning 3.1 billion yuan in advertising revenue last year -- up 77 percent.
Once again, the trends in China related to the rise of the Internet seem to be following the same story arch that we've seen here in the U.S.
And the bad news for newspaper outlets in China is likely to continue unabated as only about 12 percent of the China population is yet online (which still represents a staggering 111 million users). Further, a large percentage of those online in China skew younger (70 percent of the Internet users are under 30 years old, and 50-55 percent are under 24). As we well know, the younger generation has certainly embraced the web over newspapers.
When you also add in to the mix the 400 million mobile-phone subscribers in China, many of whom are certainly consuming lots of news and information via their phones, the future for newspapers looks somewhat grim, while the future for online and mobile looks incredibly bright.
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