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We don’t like to dwell too much on the decline of print media, because quite frankly it’s depressing. But every now and then a statistic or chart comes along that sums up the wrenching transformation that is going on in the newspaper business, and we’ve had two pop up recently that are worth noting. Both are aimed at the same fundamental issue: namely, the fact that the decline in print-advertising revenue — which has been in free-fall for years now — is not stopping, or even slowing down, any time soon. If anything, it is likely to accelerate.

The first chart comes via Mark Perry, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, based on figures from the Newspaper Association of America. As you can see below, the chart shows print-based advertising revenue dropping from about $65 billion in 2000 to about $17 billion last year — a fall of more than 70 percent. Coincidentally enough, that $17 billion is almost exactly the same amount that Google made last year from advertising in the United States, according to eMarketer (it pulled in about $50 billion or so worldwide in 2013).

This chart — which illustrates something I like to call the “cliff of despair” — is an updated version of a similar chart that Perry posted last year, and the year before that. Since he posted the first one in 2012, print-advertising revenue has fallen about $3 billion or 15 percent, and while digital advertising has made up for some of this decline, it is truly a drop in the bucket. Last year, digital accounted for about $6 billion in revenue, or about 10 percent of the $50 billion or so that has been removed from the market in the past decade and a half.

The second chart comes from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers partner and long-time internet analyst Mary Meeker’s latest State of the Internet presentation. It contrasts the amount of time that users spend on a specific form of media — mobile, print, TV etc. — with the share of advertising spending that is devoted to that platform. Last year, print got just 5 percent of the overall time spent on media, but it pulled in almost 20 percent of the overall advertising revenue.

Like the newspaper revenue slide above, Meeker’s chart is an updated version of an earlier one, and the share of time spent that is devoted to print has (not surprisingly) continued to decline over the past couple of years, as Josh Benton points out at the Nieman Journalism Lab. But while the amount of advertising dollars devoted to it has also continued to fall, there is still a dramatic gap. And it is matched by the exact opposite gap on the other side of the chart, where time spent on mobile is 20 percent and share of advertising spend is just 4 percent.

By now, the continued rapid decline of print probably shouldn’t be taking anyone by surprise, but the fact that even leading publications like the New York Times still need to remind their senior staff of these factors in documents like their internal innovation report (which, somewhat ironically, was lavishly printed on paper) shows there is much work to be done translating that knowledge into action. If you work at a newspaper, post these charts in your staff room.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr / Monik Markus