News by the ton: 75 years of US advertising — Benedict Evans

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

Meanwhile, Google and Facebook created huge new ad businesses on the internet, that advertisers prefer, and some newspaper companies think that somehow or other they should get some of that money.

Stepping back, though we should probably ask where all these ad budgets are coming from, and, more importantly, where the growth for internet advertising will come from next. The obvious answer is television: print is mostly already gone, but ‘TV’ viewing is now finally unlocking, with US pay TV subscriptions now down by over a third