Ad revenues and what it tells us about paywalls

Ad revenues and what it tells us about paywalls, article.
I’ve had this idea for the longest time that print magazines got more ad money not because of the influence they had but because they had convinced advertisers that they were worth more.
[...] If I’m right, then the real situation is that the print ad revenue bubble is going to burst. In fact, this might explain why so many papers have gone belly up in the past 5 years. They might have been used to an artificial situation which is going away.

He may have a very good point. There has never been any exact way to measure the effectiveness of advertising... until the web! So the fact that advertising has become much cheaper on the web may say more about advertising than it does about the web!

Of course one should take "measure" with a bit of salt: a potential buyer may not give the click-revenue right away, but he may come back later and buy, and this may not be counted as fall-off from the ad. There are complexities.