I’m always surprised how much businesses—especially small businesses—spend on advertising in print media: newspapers and magazines.

Check out the following chart from KPCB/eMarketer:

While people only spend 8% (and dropping) of their media consumption time with print, advertisers devote 27% of their media budgets to print. On the flipside, advertisers only spend 19% of their budgets on online advertising, yet their audience is spending 25% (and rising) of its media consumption time online.

The problem is exacerbated by the significantly higher cost of print advertising. The following chart is a few years old, but it shows the average CPM (cost per thousand advertising impressions) of various media.

Newspaper costs nearly $65 per 1000 impressions, while online costs less than $4.

Why do small businesses overspend on print advertising? I can think of a few reasons:

• Small businesses are more comfortable with tangible media like newspaper and magazine
• Magazine ads (especially full page color ads in glossy magazines) have a high perceived value. Small businesses likely believe that they will benefit from some sort of “halo effect” from being associated with the magazine
• Small businesses believe that TV is out of reach for them (even though TV is less expensive than print)
• Small businesses reason that it is easier to produce a decent magazine ad than a TV commercial (which is true) and they are afraid that crappy TV-station-produced commercials will negatively impact their brand (also true)

If you want to stretch your ad budget, think about shifting the dollars you spend on print ads to online or TV. Need help? Contact me.