Marc Andreessen’s news-business fairy tale
The news industry is not in for exponential growth
Marc Andreessen has some outlandish predictions about the future of the journalism business:
I am more bullish about the future of the news industry over the next 20 years than almost anyone I know. You are going to see it grow 10X to 100X from where it is today.Sorry, but those numbers are crazy town, as Poynter’s Rick Edmonds notes.
The US newspaper business alone is about a $35 billion-a-year industry. Add in cable news channels, local newscasts, network news shows, magazines, digital-only sites, and radio and you’re surely up to at least $50 billion.
Is the news going to become a $5 trillion industry? No. That would be one-third of the US economy.
Could the news become a $500 billion industry? No. All advertising spending in the US comes to about $170 billion a year, and only a small portion of ad money goes to news organizations.
Edmonds is on this:
A major order-of-magnitude issue also afflicts Andreessen’s central contention — that the news industry can grow 10 times to 100 times its current size over the next 20 years… But I cannot get to 10 times, let alone 100, unless 240-hour days are right around the corner. There is only so much time, and only so much time for consuming news, even with double screening. And part of the news industry’s problem is competition for that time from non-news entertainment content and diversions like games and Facebooking.When people spent 30 to 40 minutes a day on the old newspaper bundle (and tens of millions of people still do), a good chunk of that time—probably most of it— was spent on non-news parts of the paper: the sports page, the living section, the funnies, etc....MORE
