Newspaper Online Advertising Spending Jumps 19%, Print Ads Down 9%

Advertising expenditures for newspaper websites in 2007 increased 18.8 percent, to $3.2 billion - accounting for 7.5 percent of all newspaper ad spending last year (up from 5.7 percent in 2006), according to preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America, MarketingCharts writes.

Print ad expenditures were down 9.4 percent in the same period, however, and total (combined print and online) newspaper ad expenditures were down 7.9 percent for the year, according to the estimates.

(See table of online and print newspaper ad expenditures, by quarter, for 2007 and 2006.)

In the fourth quarter of 2007, advertising expenditures for newspaper websites increased to $847 million, up 13.6 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.

That was the thirteenth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth for online newspaper advertising since NAA started reporting online ad spending in 2004.

Advertising expenditures at newspapers and their websites, combined, totaled $12.6 billion for the fourth quarter; spending for print ads in newspapers totaled $11.7 billion.

(See table of newspaper print ad expenditures, broken down by segment and quarter, for 2007 and 2006.)

Those figures are down from the fourth quarter of 2006, when total advertising expenditures were $14 billion, and print ad spend was $13.2 billion.

About the data: The NAA website has quarterly and annual ad spending numbers in their entirety.