Don't Waste Your Money On Newspaper Advertising. Pring Newspapers Are Dead (except for a few).

Newspaper Advertising is Proving to Be Complete Waste of Money Newspapers Are so Quickly Becoming Obsolete Technology that Advertisers Are Foolish to Continue Using Them to Get Their Message Out Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Newspaper advertising has become worth less than the cost of purchasing an ad in most cases since the advent of Internet and cable news media dominance. Some major newspapers are resorting to selling obituary advertisements so that the local community can pay for more than just a listing. Even the newspaper paid obituary ad is proving worthless because the ad only appears one day. An Internet can give people a whole website to put up lots of pictures of the deceased , family and lots of room to write anything and everything and the obituary can almost permanently exist in cyberspace. Fortunately for the newspaper most of the people dying today have never used the Internet and have only read newspapers. That is not going to last as the Internet is even now being installed in nursing homes. The Internet like cable television allows advertisers to target their best prospects. Newspaper ads are hit or miss and are far more expensive because of the physical plant print process and high costs of all the staff required of newspapers to operate. So far No newspapers have outsourced staff work to India. Copy editing would become difficult with the language barriers? The old classified ads are tiny , and hard to read . A lot of people with good eye vision still have to squint to see the tiny type set print. Go to craigslist online and you can actually make the type size any size by adjusting your computer monitor. Craigslist is getting a lot of blame for killing newspapers and they deserve the blame but only as the best sort of creative destruction imaginable. The basic craigslist classified advertisement is free and it is search-able by keywords and classified by category such that it is more targeted and more accessible now that there is such a large population of Internet users in the country. Originally Craigslist and former popular free classified advertising sites that Craigslist superseded did not have the necessary critical mass of participants (not just viewers in the old newspaper classified ad monopoly )using the system. Some newspapers have been forced to provide some small free classified in print advertisements because that is now what they are really worth at the old line ex-monopoly newspapers. The interesting thing is that at the same time the craigslist advertisement classified ad has become worth paying for and people do pay for craigslist adverting in certain categories including job listings. The market is telling newspapers that they should be running a free service in basic classified advertising now and Newspapers don't know how to react to the advice of the marketplace. A number of newspapers are courting the Obama administration for a bail out if necessary. That would be like horse and carriage makers lobbying the government to keep them in business after Henry Ford became successful. It would have been disastrous for the country if it had ever happened on a major scale. Had we let that sort of thing happen back in 1906 the United States would have never been able to participate in World War I and in world war II the country would have become Japanese and Nazi occupied. The important thing that people can do to prevent letting newspapers get away with becoming the next Amtrak is to completely cancel your subscription and not waste any more time or money advertising there. The content of newspapers has become more and more ideological and worthless to most people as news which is yet an other reason people are just saying no to having anything to do with them or advertising there. As the newspapers and their unions try to butter up big government to come in and make them government adult day care employment for so called journalists and other staff people including editors the newspapers are pumping out FDR style propaganda. The propaganda is increasingly even becoming a last ditch effort in some cases these newspapers , the big capitalist monopoles of the past are looking like Stalinist rags. At some point maybe they will have to go to the Obama administration and get a newspaper support tax or even force business to pay advertising taxes to keep the newspapers alive by having ads printed that no one is ever going to read. This is not a joke. People who own and operate the old line monopoly papers know that they are not going to be able to survive not with technology like the reader page kindle from Amazon becoming popular new technology. To make mater's worse Amazon now has competition from Sony in page readers. In order to reinvent themselves newspapers can go into pure Internet media print technology but already a lot of sources online are far ahead of the old print line newspapers . Google has become the biggest advertising machine on the face of the earth. It has a natural monopoly prospect that it has not even fully realized the potential of yet. One can go to Google finance or yahoo finance and get real financial news that makes the Wall Street Journal a waste of time and at the same time one can watch the stock and bond markets online in real time online and also find key word search point and click data without having to squint the eyes to look in old after the fact stock tables. The wall street journal is probably one of the few major newspapers that will survive but already it is becoming something that it did not used to be with flashier more irrelevant stories and targeted advertising that although a waste of money still has prestige. Newspaper advertising that is highly specialized may survive but even grocery coupons are easier to find with a key word search online. As newspapers complain on front pages about carbon foot prints and saving the earth most of them are big tree killers for newsprint and few of them do anything to recycle the waste. The average newspaper wastes more energy than ever running unnecessary printing presses most built back in the 1950s and then having to transport physical masses of newsprint all over town and though the mail. Newspapers are such an old fashioned business they practically deserve to die. Some of us secretly hope a few of them survive but it is not likely. The new york times may survive just because it is a national paper and it has a core urban area that it services and some people buy newspapers just to put in the underlining trays of bird cages. buying fresh newsprint in the store can be more expensive than buying advertising subsidized news print from a news stand. This probably means that the luxury of subscribing to print newspapers is going to go up in price or will be reserved for free counter local culture rags. A new model for something like the wall street journal or the times would be a daily index to key words to search on the Internet but even that makes the distribution waste of money. Someone probably already has a patented online daily news index that makes it easier than the yahoo news index. The Yahoo daily news index is amazing technology and it can be customized in my yahoo. To get the best newspaper experience you can right you without a newspaper you go to yahoo and then go to register for a my yahoo account which is free. Then you decide what news you want searched for by category and key words daily. So if you are following events in the mid east and south Africa or Indiana exclusively and don't want to leaf though hundreds of pages of newsprint junk filler stories and advertising you can have it instantly delivered to your my yahoo site with instant updating. The yahoo format works well and does not have the targeted ad stories on the page like the similar google pages do. The Yahoo site is probably complemented by having google do the same thing for you. Instantly you don't have to waste your time with all the editorial nonsense and ideology de jour of newspapers or if you want that you can ask for it and get it. You can even get most of the stories and content from the big old dying newspapers online for free. The cost of seeing online ads is a lot lower than having to see them in newspapers taking up so much newsprint space or forcing you to squint to see the ads you do want to see. Google targeted ads are a better bargain and like craigslist ads they really work. Companies like Department stores, food stores who used to be big newsprint ad buyers know they have to get online and ubiquitous as soon as possible so their competition does not raise more awareness then they do for brand name. People should consider canceling newspaper delivery because of the combined expense and harm being done to the environment and when necessary share the paper with neighbors buy putting read papers in paper boxes on front porches where neighbors can read them before recycling for free. Otherwise it just makes more sense to give up on newspapers altogether, go online for the news and advertise there because that is where the critical mass is going. Some newspapers just go expanding their obituary ad and wedding listing or resorting to publishing anniversary ads but that is a hell of a place to advertise most products. Cemetery plot advertisements in the obituary ad section is not even appealing to the funeral industry. The consolidation of newspapers into a force of just a few national competing chains looks inevitable and it seems that with reader pages like kindle and bigger better ones coming out soon that most newspapers will have to consider going into the business of printing wrapping paper with their big old presses or something else because everything they are doing is just going into a landfill. Businesses that need to advertise that don't want to become obsolete like the newspapers have to move on the Internet and away from newsprint faster than ever or their competition will dominate. .