Three weeks ago, we reported on the rise of online advertising. Over the past few years, online ads have quickly grown past newspaper and magazine advertising to become the second largest ad medium behind television.
We played with the numbers a little bit and found an interesting piece of information that nicely illustrates how ad markets have changed in the past decade: in the first six months of 2012, Google raked in $20.8 billion in ad revenue, while the whole of U.S. print media (newspapers and magazines) generated just $19.2 billion from print advertising. That is, Google, a company founded just 14 years ago, attracts more advertising money than an industry that has been around for more than a hundred years.
Given the fact that Google operates globally, the comparison is obviously unfair and shouldn’t be judged scientifically, but nonetheless it shows how big Google’s ad business really is and how small print advertising has become.
Source: Statista
Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the advertising revenue for both Google and print sources as $10.9 billion and $10.5 billion respectively.
