Print media advantages and disadvantages include the disadvantages related to costs, audience, and analytics.

This is the fourth post and completes my series on print media advantages and disadvantages. You can read the rest of this series by clicking on the link below and then the links at the bottom of each post.

Print Media Advantages And Disadvantages For Marketing – Readers

Today’s post covers three print media disadvantages that relate to rising costs, falling subscriptions and readership by younger audiences, and the difficulty of tracking analytics with print media.

Print Media Advantages
And Disadvantages
Disadvantage 3 – Costs

Paper and labor costs have been rising. Thus, print media expenses have increased the costs of, and lowered the number of, subscriptions and advertisements. This results in what journalists call a “shrinking news hole.”

A shrinking news hole occurs when costs go up while sales are going down. The print media entrepreneur has to give advertising a larger percentage of space while simultaneously reducing the total amount of space available. So the hole devoted to news shrinks.

Shrinking news holes lessen publicity opportunities and alter the editorial/advertising ratio for most print media. So there’s less content to attract people to ads.

As subscriber numbers also decrease, advertising space becomes less valuable. Most print media base their advertising rates on their number of subscribers or regular readers. Then advertising rates reflect the cost to reach a thousand of them.

It’s getting more and more difficult for print media to make a profit while keeping cost-per-thousand rates low enough to attract advertisers.

Print Media Advantages
And Disadvantages
Disadvantage 4 – Audience

Print media doesn’t reach young adults. If you want to reach generations X or X, don’t use print media. These young people don’t trust mass media, and they don’t like to read.

The younger generations don’t trust the media because they’ve experienced media representatives usurping people’s privacy. They don’t trust the media because they see the sensationalism and subjectivity of mass media news.

The younger generations developed learning styles not well supported by print media. They want more than a written message sometimes complimented by art. They want video, audio, animation, and other interactive and sensual content. Just reading leaves them less than captured by a message.

Print Media Advantages
And Disadvantages
Disadvantage 5 – Analytics

It’s difficult to track analytics from print media ads. Print media provides no technology to track what pages, and specific content that people read. This makes it difficult to adjust marketing messages and make them more effective.

For example, let’s say you write a news release and submit it to hundreds of print media. How can you learn how effective your message is? Just determining the print media that run your release requires hiring a clipping service. Then you won’t start getting clippings for a week. So by the time you know which media used your release, it’s too late to encourage those who didn’t.

Tracking how many people read your release or were influenced by it is even more difficult. In fact about the only way is to encourage a quick action that’s unique to your news release offer.

If you want to read more about media, click the link below:

How Media Influences Society And Market Segmentation, Part 1

If you want to do your own newspaper advertising, check out Great Newspaper Advertising. With it, you’ll be creating effective ads in no time.

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Posted 11-24-08:
Print Media Advantages And Disadvantages
Costs, Audience, Analytics

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