What about Sunday ad inserts?
My anorexic local paper thumped down by my front door (late, as usual) Sunday morning, but I could hardly find the actual paper among the inserts. Two complete “sections” of inserts, each three times as big as the paper itself.
It is as if the Sunday newspaper carrier is a paid deliverer of inserts, and oh yeah, here are a few pages of news.
On Monday morning when I picked up the paper, it was so thin I honestly thought the carrier had left out a few sections. Nope. Just thinner than ever.
Then I thought about those inserts the day before. ROP advertising is down, but are inserts? Doesn’t seem like it in my local paper. I understand that newspapers get about $25 per thousand for the inserts. This is considerably less than they get for ROP ads, which help increase the pages in the paper.
Clearly, advertisers still want to reach newspaper subscribers, at least on Sundays. In 2007, more than $5 billion was spent on advertising inserts, according to a knowledgeable blogger. It may be lower now, but probably not much.
If the desire to spend that much money remains strong as newspaper readers are going away, what is going to happen to those insert dollars as we move toward the web? Turn inserts into web site pop-ups? That’s not going to work, but I have an idea.
The USPS is losing money. Maybe they could get into the insert delivery business on Sundays — and deliver mail as well, taking Mondays off instead — as newspapers complete their migration to the web. People could sign up or not, saving paper and trees.
Maybe some advertisers would run more Sunday ROP ads instead. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a thick Sunday morning paper again?
I hope someone will enlighten me about the economics of Sunday inserts….