There are lots of things going on here, but I would start with the top line: advertising share of GDP started sliding immediately after the Dotcom bubble, had a major step down in the financial crisis and has been suspiciously flat ever since. That decline was very obviously concentrated in print but actually affected TV and radio as well. We think... See more

US advertising has shrunk by a third as a share of GDP. This is some combination of internet advertising being vastly cheaper and vastly more efficient on one hand, and on the other a lot of recategorisation. If a car dealer used to buy a 20 page ad insert in their local paper, but now pays for one Google search ad (and how many people bid against ... See more

The problem ‘akshually’ is that contemporary programmatic advertising is too efficient, and the ads sales people at The New York Times selling outrageously priced ads on a fixed, rate-card basis were selling media not really worth the cost (when measured at the level of precision the internet makes possible). Decades worth of such advertising mispr... See more