The death spiral is accelerating for newspaper advertising which just suffered its biggest drop in more than 50 years according to new data released today. Editor & Publisher Magazine reported figures from the Newspaper Association of America that said total print  

advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% compared to 2006 - the most severe percentage decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures back in 1950. 

Though the online advertising revenues generated by newspaper owned websites is still growing at a double digit rate, there are signs that the rate of growth in that category is starting to slow down. Internet ad revenue for newspapers in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it also jumped 31.4% to $2 billion. 

Print classified advertising revenue, which had 

been the newspaper's overpriced bread and butter for decades, dropped a breathtaking 16.5% to $14.1 billion in 2007. With popular sites like CraigsList.org giving away classified ads for free that is a business that is not coming back for newspapers. 

Of course a lot of the ad dollars that had been spent on newspapers have migrated to the web, which begs the question why are domain owners seeing their share of a growing pie decline? With domain owners currently at the mercy of only two major upstream providers, Google and Yahoo, they haven't been able to do much about getting consistently shortchanged. I do believe that sooner or later competitors will spring up that will give those whose produce the traffic their fair share of the revenue being generated by that traffic. In fact I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.
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