5 Jun 2013

Newspaper ad revenue decline tipped to continue

1:23 pm on 5 June 2013

A report by accounting firm PwC predicts newspapers' advertising revenue will decline at about 5% every year until 2017, and says they need to urgently adapt to survive.

The report says the media and entertainment industry spent $39 million on advertising in 2012, an increase of 12.4% on the year before.

That boost was mainly driven by an increase in online advertising which the report predicts will overtake newspaper advertising by 2015.

Mobile advertising grew by a massive 175% in 2012.

PwC partner Paul Brabin says traditional newspaper publishing will lose its number one slot to television advertising revenues for the first time this year.

He says newspapers must find ways of making people pay for their online product and the industry must rethink its business model to deal with the rapid change in technology.