A report published by the Interacting Advertising Bureau, an association that brings together the main web sites and Internet portals in Brazil, said that the Internet has surpassed newspapers and has become the second-most preferred medium for advertising investments in Brazil during the first quarter of the 2012 year, reported iG.
The research was based on advertising investments in news sites, search engines, and price comparison websites, which together amounted to 11.98 percent of the total revenues, while newspapers remained at 11.06 percent of the advertising dollars, estimated at more than $3 billion.
According to the website Olhar Digital, in 2011 print held second place with 11.1 percent and the web followed after with 11 percent. Television came in first in the ranking with 58.4 percent. This year, TV remained in first place with an even larger share of 60.63 percent of the market.
The new advertising trend follows the growth of online content consumption, with the cheapening of internet access. In Brazil, however, readers' transition from print to online has not been significant enough to impact newspaper circulation, which continues to grow. That growth is driven by popular newspapers, the opposite of what is happening in the U.S. and in Europe.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.