Over the last seven years, for each dollar added to online revenue, the WaPo lost five dollars on print. During that time, the Post has lost $88m of print ad revenue and it improved its online business by only $18m. This leads us to a key realization, a sobering one: there is no hope current online revenue stream will someday offset the past decade’s tremendous losses. – Monday Note
Once upon a time, newspapers monopolized (relatively) cheap access to a community’s eyeballs and, by extension, its checkbooks. They served up advertising that, unlike television and radio, did not require the potential customer to be tuned in “right now.” Retail businesses loved them. As in all unregulated monopolies before and after them, newspaper executives used this market power to extract what economists call monopoly rents: more profit than they would have garnered had there been “competition.”
