While going through The Business Times section of today’s Sunday Times (a South African Sunday newspaper), I came across this print ad:
The ad got me thinking, I have read broadly on this subject of media trends for over 6 years now.
A bit of context
South Africa is going through a bout of load-shedding at the moment due to demand for electricity that exceeds supply. I am not going to explore this topic at all as it is not the subject of my post, but you can read more about it here.
Relevant media stats
As can be seen from the print ad above, an attempt by Times Media is to leverage this unfortunate situation by encouraging South Africans to read newspapers (hopefully Times Media’s titles) during the tv blackouts (or is the ad in fact encouraging a complete switch?).
Being the all-things-digital-nut that I am, I remembered seeing a slide about time spent in media vs adspend found in the 2015 Internet Trends report by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB).
The stats above, which are unfortunately based on the US market, clearly show that print advertising is out of kilter with time spent in the medium. I searched for similar stats for South Africa, and the most recent time-spent-in-media-in-South-Africa report was last released in 2012 by Statista.
As can be seen from the graph above, time spent on print is the second lowest.
Here is a table of South Africa’s ad spending, courtesy of eMarketer.
In 2012, print’s ad spend in South Africa was the second highest after TV at 34%.
However, A 10-year trend analysis shows though that this contribution has almost halved.
Noticeably, the global trend shows that people are increasingly spending time away from traditional media.
Question
My online research, as part of putting together this post, has pointed out that there differing and sometime diametrically opposed views on whether print is a dying media channel.
This question is now posed to you, as the reader of this post:
[polldaddy poll=8929969]
