The New York Times Co.’s advertising department is struggling to replace its once-lucrative print ads with digital sales, as Google Inc. (GOOG) and Facebook Inc. gobble up increasingly large chunks of marketers’ budgets.
Both print and digital advertising at the newspaper decreased about 3 percent in the third quarter, the company said last month, signaling that the total amount fell below $140 million. That’s the lowest level since at least 1998, when the Times began reporting the ad revenue of its individual papers.
While the entire newspaper business is suffering advertising woes, the Times’ prestige and elite readership should be giving it a leg up over other publications, said Rick Edmonds, a media analyst with the Poynter Institute. Instead, the paper hasn’t yet capitalized on its surging online audience. The slump also has led to management turnover and budget cuts, hampering the ad department’s ability to attract new clients, people familiar with the situation said.
Source: Edmund Lee, Bloomberg
