The ongoing migration and focus of print newspapers to digital newspapers is continuing to pay off in relationship to visitors, as in 2007, the industry enjoyed an overall growth of unique visitors to their online websites, increasing by 6 percent for the year, ending at over 60 million a month.
For the last quarter, page views for the industry grew to over 3 billion, an increase of 7.3 percent over the last quarter of 2006.
While that's good news in general, the balance to that is in spite of viewer growth, online revenue growth has been declining during 2007 for the industry.
During the first three quarters of 2007, the total for online revenue for the newspapers was $2.32 billion, an increase of close to 20 percent.
That's a decline from the 2005-2006 period, where the average revenues online grew at a 31 percent clip.
Ad revenue on the print side dropped to $10.1 billion, down 9 percent year-over-year.
None of this is unexpected, as large web portals have had similar experiences. The rate of growth online had to settle down, simply by the law of averages. There was no way it could continue at the past pace that exceeded over 40 percent for quite a long time.
This doesn't mean there's a problem in the online advertising growth sector, just that it's slowing to reflect the market realities. The ad industry is still migrating to the internet, and it will grow for years to come, but not at the past rates.
One other factor is that a number of companies and ad agencies have been experimenting with advertising on social network sites. That has put pressure on ad prices for content aggregators and owners, as it has driven down the prices.
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