• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, March 15, 2011

The modest recovery in ad spending over the course of 2010 did not benefit newspapers, which suffered yet another round of ad revenue declines in the fourth quarter of last year, according to the Newspaper Association of America.  

Indeed, the rate of loss appeared basically unchanged over the last three quarters of 2010 -- raising the ominous possibility that print ad revenues will simply remain locked into a long-term decline going forward.

Total print ad revenues dropped 6.75%, from about $6.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009 to about $6.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, according to the NAA, with losses spread evenly across all the major ad categories.

National advertising fell 5.66% to $1.15 billion, retail slumped 6.72% to $3.67 billion, and classifieds slid 7.56% to $1.62 billion. Within the classifieds category, automotive dropped 6.5% to $344 million and real estate tumbled 17.2% to $284 million. However, recruitment was a bright spot, growing 5.1% to $214 million.

Despite the uptick in recruitment revenues, these classified revenue figures show a shocking decline from just a few years ago. Automotive is down 73.5% from $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005, while real estate tumbled 81.2% from $1.5 billion. Recruitment plunged 85.6% from $1.49 billion over the same period.

Looking at the full year, total print ad revenues fell 8.2% from $24.8 billion in 2009 to $22.8 billion in 2010. This works out to a decline of 51.9% from $47.4 billion in 2005; meaning that newspapers lost over half their print revenues in just five years.

Online advertising is the sole beacon of hope for an increasingly desperate industry, but it still remains a relatively small part of the overall business -- even after precipitous declines on the print side.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, total online ad revenues increased 14% to $878 million, or about 12% of the combined print-online total of $7.3 billion. For the full year 2010, online revenues increased 10.9% to just over $3 billion, or 11.6% of the combined print-online total of $25.8 billion.