Merrill Lynch weighs in on state of newspaper market

By Randy Davidson on October 26th, 2006

Paidcontent.org reports that Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Fine has released a report about the newspaper market. Among the findings:

- online now represents 6-7% of newspaper ad revenues on average.

- assuming (aggressive) double-digit growth for online ad revenues through 2012 and then 5% thereafter, while print ad revenues drop by 1.5% annually, we do not see online representing over 50% of total newspaper ad revenues until more than 30 years from now.

- ML is fearful the recovery coming out of the current downturn could be even more muted as online continues to transform the newspaper’s most lucrative, and most cyclical category, classifieds.