SWEDEN — A new study indicates the pace of growth in the world of digital mass media is expected to increase advertising revenues 12-fold during the nine-year period ending in 2011. By 2011, digital and mobile media advertising revenues are expected to reach $150 billion worldwide, according to the study.“World Digital Media Trends,” compiled by the World Association of Newspapers with the help of 71 international research groups, was released Tuesday during WAN’s annual meeting in Goteborg, Sweden. Among the organization’s findings: Google and Yahoo! will continue to garner about 60-percent of projected global advertising revenues.
That makes the picture a bit less than rosy for everyone else trying to corner a share of the pie, according to WAN President Gavin O’Reilly.
“The Net is a wonderful place if you know what you are looking for,” he told the audience during a panel debate about digital media’s impact on revenues. “But we run the risk that running headlong into digital will turn dollars into pennies [for the rest of us].”
In addition, the study found wireless device adoption will triple between 2002 and 2011, to 3.4 billion subscribers. The number of homes with broadband internet connections likely will increase even more dramatically — by at least a factor of 10, from 51.38 million households worldwide in 2002 to nearly 540 million households in 2011. That gives credence to the study’s claim that in some countries “the internet will become the primary news and information source within five years, while newspapers will lose the dominating position they have held for more than a century.”
However, the report hastily added that newspapers and other traditional print media are not in danger of becoming dinosaurs in the near future.
“All of us in the industry know the big strategic issues and challenges at play in the fast evolving digital world; and, the really successful publishers are those who recognize and capitalize on the newspapers’ relative position in the busy media matrix,” New York Times Digital News Editor Jim Roberts told another seminar crowd. “Happily, that is the majority of publishers today.”
