From Asia Times:
The advertising market of China’s print media is now threatened by Internet portals, search engines and other websites, just like everywhere else in the world, so much so that some large newspaper groups are trying to form an alliance to boycott the provision of content to Internet news providers, in a desperate tactic that most analysts see as doomed.
Thanks to China’s fast economic development since the late 1970s, Chinese newspapers and the print media in general enjoyed double-digit growth in profits annually for more than a decade – until last year. A market research report jointly released by Tsinghua University and the Social Sciences Academic Press (China) has pointed out that 2005 was the “turning point” for newspapers, when their profit growth began to slow down dramatically as the Internet rapidly ate into their market share in advertising. [Full text]
