It’s official. Just as online search recently surpassed the Yellow Pages as the most popular method for finding online businesses, so have online newspapers surpassed print newspapers as the source where most Americans get their information. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise people who have been following trends in local Internet marketing.
In December 2008, the Pew Research Center found that 40% of people get most of their news from online sources, up from 25% in September 2007.
This doesn’t sound like good news for the struggling newspaper industry. Right now, revenues for local Internet marketing are not nearly enough to make up for the revenue lost from their print advertising. But there is a silver lining for the papers and local Internet marketing professionals.
According to a report from the Online Publishers Association, more than half of the users of local sites trust ads that appear there, and that user satisfaction with content on those local sites is high.
Local news media is in for some serious restructuring in the near future, but local content is too important to most Web users to disappear. Look to see ad revenues for local media sites increase steadily, and look for local Internet marketing to boom.
