( Silicon Alley Insider ) -- Newspaper companies are a dying breed , and one consistent scapegoat for their demise is the rise of blogs and online news sites . In October 2009 , Tom Curly , CEO of the Associated Press news service , said blogs were directing large amounts of revenue away from original content creators . At the same time , Rupert Murdoch sneered at bloggers , saying they would cause the `` content creators '' like his company News Corp. , parent of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post , `` to pay the ultimate price '' if they were not held in check . Blogs and other new media from Facebook to Twitter have made newspapers less relevant . If you want quicker , more focused news , blogs are a great resource . If you want more local , hyperpersonal news -- i.e. , what your sister 's cat did today -- then Facebook or Twitter are your best bets . But despite factors of expediency and personalization , new media outlets are not to blame for the creeping death of newspapers . It makes for a great story to have upstart blogs destroying hidebound news organizations , but the truth is much more simple . Advertisers are killing newspapers . Advertisers have fled newspapers for the greener , cheaper pastures of the internet and they 're not coming back . On the internet , an advertiser has a greater ability to target his or her ad spend . Want to advertise to just teenage boys interested in football ? Ca n't do that with the newspaper . Want to advertise to women from Yale ? Ca n't do that in a newspaper . The numbers prove this out . Alan Mutter , an expert on the economics of the newspaper industry , recently reported that newspaper advertising was down about 10 percent year-over-year for the first quarter of the year . Meanwhile , advertising on the internet , radio and television were all up . Web advertising was up 7.5 percent . Newspapers still attract more ad dollars than the web , but that is expected to change soon . PricewaterhouseCoopers ' annual report on media trends reported that web advertising totaled $ 24.2 billion last year . The Newspaper Association of America reported $ 24.82 billion in advertising for 2009 . By the end of this year , the web may be in front . The expansion of advertising on the web is both good news and bad news for newspapers . Newspapers like The New York Times have taken advantage of the web to create amazing products like interactive graphics and videos . This has helped propel their overall readership to new heights . Millions of people visit The New York Times ' website daily . That 's important to keep in mind when anyone thinks of blaming blogs for the death of newspapers . There 's enough people on the web to go around . Newspapers and blogs are expanding their audiences simultaneously . As newspapers take advantage of the medium to tell stories , they 'll see some of that $ 24 billion in online ad dollars . Unfortunately , it wo n't be enough to support what they do now -- and most of the money is going to the likes of Google . The New York Times online edition only generates a fraction of the revenue of the print publication . The Times is a lot less relevant as a place to advertise online than it was offline . And no , blogs are not siphoning many dollars off The New York Times online franchise . The Huffington Post is the most successful blog in the world , with some 12 million unique visitors a month . That traffic bests traditional news organizations like the Washington Post , The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal by a couple of million . Yet , for all its success , revenue remains relatively elusive . HuffPo only generated $ 15 million last year . It hopes to double that this year to $ 30 million , but that 's still tiny . For some perspective , The New York Times ' online revenue is an estimated $ 150 million to $ 175 million annually . If advertisers are n't spending heavily on blogs or traditional news organizations , where are they spending ? Google . The search giant has annual revenue of more than $ 20 billion , with the vast majority of that from web advertising . The funny thing about Google is that it has tried to master almost every sort of business . It 's investing in windmills , it 's investing in mobile phones , it wants to lay cable for high speed internet connections , just to name a few . Yet , for all the businesses it has tried , there 's one it says it has no interest in : print content like newspapers . The reason ? Making money on newspapers , and getting advertisers interested in spending again on print publications , has even the big brains at Google stumped . Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told newspaper editors , `` We have a business model problem . We do n't have a news problem . '' We do n't have a news problem , because there 's enough news under the sun for newspapers and blogs to cover it all . Now , if there were only enough ad dollars . Copyright © 2010 Business Insider .
Newspapers still have more ad dollars than the internet , but that should soon change . Advertisers have fled newspapers for the safer , cheaper pastures of the internet . On the internet , an advertiser has a greater ability to control his or her advertising spend . Advertisers are placing ads on Google instead of traditional news organizations .