So, does this graph show that companies spend the same amount of inflation-adjusted dollars on newspaper advertising as they did in 1950? Were things good back then? What happened before the 50s?
If the chart had been adjusted for population, the decline would been even more dramatic. 1950's $20B (2011) USD was in a country slightly less than half the size of the US today.
In fact, if you look at the curve from 1950-2000 you see it seems to approximately track the population growth from 1950, with a weird peak in ~1990 and trough a few years later. My hunch is that the previous state of the industry was that it reliably took in ~$130/yr/US resident (again, in current dollars) year after year. Now it takes in less than half that, and it's plummeting.
In fact, if you look at the curve from 1950-2000 you see it seems to approximately track the population growth from 1950, with a weird peak in ~1990 and trough a few years later. My hunch is that the previous state of the industry was that it reliably took in ~$130/yr/US resident (again, in current dollars) year after year. Now it takes in less than half that, and it's plummeting.