Today, not so much, at least for the information gate-keepers/toll-takers.
From Carpe Diem:
For the last several years, I’ve been regularly posting charts like the one above showing the history of US newspaper advertising revenue back to 1950, based on data from the Newspaper Association of America. Those charts have been noteworthy for several reasons.
First, more than any of the hundreds of charts and graphs that I’ve created and posted on Carpe Diem over the last seven years, the newspaper ad revenue charts have received the most attention by far. Those charts have been featured on so many other blogs and websites that a recent Reuters article referred to a recent version as a “much-reproduced chart.” If you do a Google image search for “newspaper ad revenue,” you’ll see many versions of the CD chart above. I hope this is a testament to how powerful and compelling the graphical representation of data can be!
Second, it’s possible that the attention the ad revenue charts were generating on the Internet may have contributed to the decision by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) in 2013 to suddenly stop its long-standing practice of reporting quarterly advertising revenue data, and switch to releasing only annual data (not yet available from NAA for 2014, but available here from BIA/Kelsey). In a 2013 interview, NAA CEO Caroline Little was quoted as saying that she and the organization’s board decided it was “time to stop beating themselves up four times a year with the negative numbers.”
The updated chart above shows annual data from 1950 to 2014 in inflation-adjusted (2014) dollars. The blue line represents total annual print newspaper advertising revenue (for the three categories national, retail, and classified), and appear in the chart as billions of constant 2014 dollars....MORE
