Long term trend watch: Barry Ritholz at the Big Picture discusses whether the WSJ should make its archives accessable for free. What really caught my eye was this chart…
Yowza. It looks like the crossover point (online exceeds print ads) is still pretty far into the future. Now that 50% of households have broadband penetration the trend should accelerate (online up, print down) but overall top-line growth probably won’t return until well into next decade. It will be interesting to see how some of these recent newspaper acquistions (excluding the WSJ deal, which is cut from a different strategic cloth) do financially. My guess is "not well".
