If Print is Dying, Why Do Realtors Still Waste Money Advertising on a Corpse?

You may have gotten the message: newspapers and some print products are in financial trouble. Newspapers, and now even broadcast, has a shrinking audience.

Once upon a time we had a limited amount of media to turn to — daily newspapers, radio, daily TV stations — we had at least five in Chicago, where I grew up, and thought we were special indeed — and some local magazines. The broadcast media usually took their news from the newspaper. It was a slower time. It was a time where you could advertise a listing because it usually stayed on the market for a few months, so you could market it in a newspaper or magazine before it sold.

Now, any homes published in a magazine with a 30 day lead time are likely under contract if not sold by the time the ad hits the shelves. Your ad dollars, sweet peeps, are going down the drain.

The demise of print has hit close to home and many friends. As you know, I used to work at D Magazine. More recently, fellow journalists I know through NAREE are wringing their hands over possible job losses. Let’s look at the Orange County Register in California: a weekly, local publication in a high net worth community not too unlike the Park Cities or Preston Hollow. In June, every employee had to take a two-week furlough — there were voluntary severance packages, this after dozens of layoffs last January. We talked about this in June in Houston: OCR employees are scared, worried about their jobs and their future. The Orange County Register had been “a poster child for confident community news investment and a revival of targeted print” so much that the dynamic but maybe overly optimistic publisher,  Aaron Kushner,  published an L.A. Register in December, even though “yellow flags had already started to pop up.”

Two months earlier, it announced the purchase of the neighboring Riverside Press-Enterprise for $27 million from A.H. Belo. Before the deal finalized around Thanksgiving, Kushner suffered public embarrassment as the high-wire act required to locate the cash and close the deal became clear. Then, in January, weeks after the L.A. Register announcement, the Register took 32 jobs out of the newsroom and saw its four top newsroom leaders, including longtime editor Ken Brusic, quit, in something between protest and pure emotional resignation. Who would staff the Los Angeles Register — serving a three-times-larger population in neighboring L.A. County — if jobs were being cut in Orange County? Forty or so staffers soon were prepped to be sent over the county line; no new journalism jobs were to be added.

This is a real estate blog; we don’t care much about the publishing world. Or do we? After all, that is where agents have sunk precious marketing dollars by the bucket loads for ages, believing they are finding buyer. As agents continue to sink dollars into print ads, they are no different than regular risk-blind investors the likes of Kushner and other publishers whose contrarian business strategies to revive a dying media should be applauded but have simply not worked.

The over-investment in print, as print continues to slowly die off, and the under-investment in digital, has only exacerbated the effect of ownership’s poor driving habits.

You have heard it here repeatedly: more and more people are consuming news electronically, through new mediums, watering down the audiences of traditional media.

So why do agents continue to advertise with traditional media? Great question.

According to a new survey published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford,  Smartphones are the disruptors, taking a bigger share of our attention than ever: 37 percent of survey respondents said they access news on a phone at least once a week, and 20 percent said they primarily accessed news via mobile devices. Do we see this changing? Yes — it will be  57% or more next year. The percentage of readers who actually pay for news has remained stagnant. A study in Finland, where the print culture is strong, shows that smartphones are winning.

 “People talk about smartphones and tablets together, but I think the smartphone is really the disruptor,” said digital strategist Nic Newman, one of the paper’s co-authors. He noted that tablet users tend to skew older. “It’s so much more mobile, and so much more personal.”

As ad revenues declined, publishers decided they would make readers pay for news. Despite many newspapers attempts to do that in one form or another, data show very little change in the absolute number of people paying for digital news over the past year. “In most countries the number paying for any news is hovering around 10% of online users and in some cases less than that.

Even so, our findings are consistent with the recent Pew research report in the United States which suggests that industry activity does not necessarily mean more individuals are paying for news but rather that ‘more revenue is being squeezed out of a smaller, or at least flat, number of paying consumers’.

I know, it’s enough to make your head swim. Readers are not going to print for news, they are going everywhere. As such, more realtors are seeing the light and pulling out. Still, it’s not very clear how you replace print ads with online to get more customers, fill open houses and sell homes. That’s where we can help.