Online and apps is the future of the newspaper industry and print is dead right? Well if that is to be the case then newspaper owners will have to get better at monetising the content. Recent financials from the Daily Mail General Trust bring this into stark reality.

The Daily Mail is widely regarded as being the content kings of the newspaper industry – its website is the highest read out of all the UK national newspapers and it continues to grow strongly with almost 66 million unique visitor numbers in  March. This was 68% higher than March 2010 and averages a daily 3.7 million unique visitors.

So by any standard the visitor numbers are a stellar success but what about the commercial figures? This is where it gets interesting. Across its entire newspaper operations, advertising revenues were up 2% at £183 million. Yet print display advertising (mostly in Metro and the Daily Mail) constituted the lion’s share of this at £148 million and classified rose 5% to £26 million. Online, although it increased 50% only constituted £8m of this – a fairly insignificant 4.3% of the total.

Therein lies the challenge – how to make this content pay. Currently whilst a market exists for display advertising (most if it fuelled by high street retailers keen to get their punters into the shops at the weekend) the concern for newspaper owners is less. But the day is quickly coming when most of us won’t look at print newspapers anymore. What then? On these figures, online ads won’t fill the gap.