The honest comparison
Newspapers built local advertising. But the way people read local news has changed and the numbers behind print ads deserve a clear look before you spend.
| Scottsdale Scoop | Print newspaper | |
|---|---|---|
| Audience trend | Growing. Locals subscribe every week on purpose. | US newspaper circulation has fallen by roughly two thirds from its peak and keeps declining. |
| Who sees your ad | 15,000 opted in Scottsdale locals. 62% open every issue. | A circulation estimate. Nobody can tell you how many people opened the page your ad was on. |
| Measurement | Opens, impressions and clicks reported after every issue. | None. You run the ad and hope the phone rings. |
| Speed to launch | Usually inside a week. | Sales cycles, ad production specs and print deadlines. Often weeks. |
| Reader age | Locals of all ages who live on their phones and inboxes. | Print readership skews heavily toward older readers. Adults under 50 have mostly moved on. |
| Format | Written into content people came to read, in a trusted voice. | A boxed ad competing with every other boxed ad on the page. |
US newspaper circulation peaked above 60 million copies a day and has fallen by roughly two thirds since. Newspaper ad revenue dropped from about $49 billion in 2005 to under $10 billion by 2020. The audience your grandfather reached with a newspaper ad mostly isn't there anymore.
Source: Pew Research Center, State of the News Media
Only about 1 in 10 US adults still often gets news from print and that group is concentrated among readers 65 and older. If your customers are 30 to 55 year old Scottsdale locals, print is a hard place to find them.
Source: Pew Research Center news consumption surveys
A newspaper can tell you how many copies were distributed. It can't tell you how many people opened to your page, read your ad or acted on it. A newsletter reports opens and clicks per issue, so you know within days whether it's working.
Source: our per issue sponsor reports, verified in beehiiv
We'll be straight with you. Newspapers still carry institutional weight, they're the right place for legal notices and a full page in a major daily reaches older readers in volume. If your business serves an audience that's mostly 65 and up, print deserves a spot in your plan. For everyone else, an opened email from a trusted local voice beats an unread page.