2019 Reports

Japanese Newspapers

Flath, David

In 2017, Japanese newspaper advertising revenue, adjusted for inflation, was only half as great as at its 1997 mini-peak. Japanese newspaper circulation also peaked in 1997, and in the two decades since then has fallen by about one-fourth (counting a morning-and-evening subscription as two, by one-fifth if counting it as one). Based on the inferences in this paper, underlying these recent changes in Japanese newspaper revenue and circulation is an 83% decrease in the demand for newspaper ads from 1997 to 2017, and a 26% decrease in demand for newspaper subscriptions, measured at the 1997 inflation-adjusted prices of ads and subscriptions. The fall in demand for newspaper ads can be directly linked to the rise of the internet using an autoregressive distributed lag model.