Consumers have started to embrace the idea of digital newspapers instead of print over the course of 2014. Advertisers have slowly started to gravitate towards promoting their brands on mobile and tablet Spending has grown in the United Kingdom 17.4% this year to £163 million, but analysts are speculating that it will only marginally increase by 8.1% next year.
Digital advertising spending is a drop in the bucket compared to print. The top national newspapers are expected to garner £1.42 billion in 2015, a 1% year-on-year increase, according to a report by the Advertising Associations.
Its not that UK advertisers are way of digital as a whole, its actually quite the opposite. The UK is predicted to become the first country in the world where more than half of all advertising spend goes to digital media.
Group M, the worldwide media buying arm of the market services company WPP, has forecast that the total UK ad market will hit £15.7 billion in 2015. Within this online spend is forecast to grow 12.7% year-on-year to break the £8 billion mark, making the UK the first in which more than £1 in every £2 of ad spend will go on digital media.
The conundrum that newspaper publishers face when trying to monetize their digital platforms is consistency. Advertisers looking to buy digital ad space from local publishers had to deal with them individually or in small groups, an inefficient process. In order to solve this issue some newspaper companies have pooled their resources together to save on marketing. Newscorp launched the News Corp Global Exchange in 2013, that brings together the ad space of 50 websites and mobile/tablet products including Times.co.uk, TheSun.co.uk, NYPost.com, TheAustralian.com.au, MarketWatch.com and News.com.au.
The lack of a unified advertising network and sheer number of digital options available have jaded most advertisers. This has forced the Times and Telegraph to embrace the paywall option, that allows readers to check out a few articles a month and then pay a subscription to read beyond a certain threshold.
Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.