Kelly - 30 years til online revenue reaches 50%

Wow, could that be more depressing - and that's assuming no new charge for usage, a possibility being bantied about in newsrooms lately. The authors account for the slowing of revenue increases down to an optimistic 5% climb each year and allow for an optimistically tiny 1.5% drop in print revenue (NY Times revenue fell 18% in the first quarter this year). Yet it will take half a century for online revenue to account for half of revenue? Will there be print revenue in half a century? It seems like newspapers, and local television news, are enslaved to economies of scale which likely can't be recovered. I suspect newspapers and local TV news, in both traditional and online formats, are likely facing permanent decreasing returns to scale (HMF p. 93). My guess is that, despite what Stepp argued for, increasing input investment will be costly with very little output return on investment. Remember, the traditional media's problems began long before Lehman Brothers failed last September... 20 years before. Like Alice mentioned, young people are online, but they're GChatting, checking Facebook and surfing. Not "newsing."