1. U.S. advertising is declining as a share of GDP. Total national ad spending, as a percentage of the economy, has fallen by a third since 2000 and now hovers near its lowest levels since the end of World War II, before the rise of television.

It wouldn’t be such a bad thing that advertising is declining as a share of the economy if news publishers held a steady or growing percent of the market. But the opposite is happening...

2. The entire net growth is U.S. advertising is digital. Between 2011 non-digital advertising fell from $126 billion to $123 billion. During the same period, digital advertising doubled from $32 billion to $60 billion. Newspapers are getting pinched. Newspaper advertising revenue and newspaper employment have both fallen to 60-year lows, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Newspaper Association of America.

3. The entire net growth in digital advertising is happening in mobile. Since 2011, desktop advertising has fallen by about 10 percent, according to Pew. Meanwhile mobile advertising has grown by a factor of 30, reaching about $32 billion in 2015. This dovetails with analysis from the digital-media analyst Mary Meeker, whose recent report on media time and advertising found that in the last five years, mobile grew at the expense of every other media platform. (The chart below was made with data from her report.)

The Atlantic

4. Two companies, Facebook and Google, control half of net mobile ad revenue. As I’ve written before, digital media today is led by a historically extraordinary duumvirate. In television, four large media companies account for half of all cable advertising, according to an analysis by the digital-media analyst Matthew Ball. They are Time Warner, Disney, NBCUniversal, and 21st Century Fox. But just two companies, Facebook and Google, account for half of all digital-media advertising. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance writes today, as far as most digital publishers are concerned, Facebook is the universe.

At the same time that access to news media is getting democratized—the internet is theoretically an all-access platform for broadcasting ideas—the business of media advertising seems to be concentrating. In the 1940s, newspapers’ and magazines’ ad revenue was divided across thousands of publishers. In the 1990s and 2000s, television ad revenue was dominated by five or six entertainment companies, like Time Warner and Disney. Now two tech companies own half the digital market for ads. The New York Times was never “newspapers.” NBC was never “television.” But Facebook and Google are “the internet.”

What does this mean for the future of news? To acknowledge this shift toward mobile is not to embrace a doom-and-gloom mindset. It is happening, full stop, and people can choose for themselves to be optimists or pessimists about the economic future of the news.