Broadcast Usurps Newspapers, Online Poised To Dominate

Despite broader issues in the overall economy, the media industry continues to be among the fastest growing industrial sectors in America. Long-term secular shifts, however, are altering the role of some major media and forms of advertising and marketing services. Long the dominant U.S. advertising platform, has fallen behind broadcast TV this year, which itself is poised to be usurped by the Internet within the next three years. This year, Veronis Suhler Stevenson estimates that traditional media operators will account for nearly half (49.5%) of the $86 billion Americans will spend advertising and accessing content online. That share is up from less than a third (29.1%) in 2002, and is projected to take a dominant position by 2011 when pure-play Internet operators will account for less than half of all Internet revenues. The migration of media operators mirrors that of major advertisers who have been slashing traditional media budgets and shifting a greater share of their total marketing spending online, and into alternative forms of marketing.