Will Pay Per Click Destroy Traditional Publishing?

It's quite obvious that traditional publishing lives or dies on advertising. Just pick up any popular magazine and you'll likely find that more than 50% of it is advertising. Subscription fee's just don't cover the costs and make enough profit to be worthwhile. There is now a shift in the advertising industry to focus on online advertising and things are growing at a tremendous pace.

So this begs the question, will pay per click destroy traditional publishing? Will advertisers abandon a form that doesn't have true measurable statistics for a form that has instantaneous showing of cost-benefit? I would say so, but I also think that with the success of Google AdSense and YPN that things will take awhile as they grow out and expand. Traditional advertisers love the big glossy presentation and simple AdWords type ads just don't fit the mold.

I think there is still an untapped method of online advertising that hasn't been explored yet, but if I knew I wouldn't tell you, I'd be out there creating it. Robert X. Cringely has a column on this where he asks the question himself, here's a snippet.

Look at Google's AdWords and Yahoo's Overture, now called Yahoo Search Marketing, both of which are booming and represented between them about $6.8 billion in advertising sales in 2004 and close to $10 billion in 2005. Where did all those ad dollars come from? Some came from the Internet, itself, in the form of advertisers switching their campaigns from banner ads to pay-per-click. But most of those pay-per-click dollars were actually new to the Internet, having been stolen from TV and traditional print publishing. Say $7 billion of it was stolen from TV and print. That alone is hardly enough to cripple the U.S. TV ad industry, with $47 billion in 2004 revenue, or the U.S. newspaper ad industry, with $48 billion in 2004 sales, but both of those sectors are smaller than they were pre-9/11, and only slightly bigger than they were in 2003 despite the end of a recession

I think there will always be print media. It may end up being a lot smaller than it is now, but the benefit of print media is in it's simplicity. You don't need electricity and special devices to pick up a piece of paper. We also have to look at the demographics of the world. Some older people simply will never go online and don't want to. Even in schools there are books. So until everyone is brought up with a computer at hand -- and living a large portion of their existence online -- I don't see how it can ever take out traditional publishing.

Those of us who do live a large portion of our time online need to remember that we are not the norm and that there's a large portion of the Earth out there who do not even turn on a computer everyday, yet pick up newspapers and magazines.

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