There's been quite a bit of negative reaction to Lauren Rich Fine's reported claim that print will continue to dominate online revenues for newspapers until 2036. It seems to me that the only thing such predictions are good for is to stimulate conversation, and I say that because I performed similar calculations a couple of years ago.
Fine assumes a much lower growth rate than most healthy newspaper companies are showing online, and also assumes a sharp reduction in online growth six years from now. I made no such assumptions in my projections. Instead, I took real data from the previous five years -- remarkably consistent growth -- and did a simple projection until the online curve crossed the print curve. Naturally I came up with a radically different answer.
I don't know what Fine's research report actually says -- apparently it's just for Merrill Lynch customers, and I'm not one of them. But I was very careful in my "analysis" to point out that it was complete hogwash, intended only to fuel a "what-if" discussion, because change doesn't happen that way.
Real change is full of discontinuity. Sometimes it's driven by technological breakthroughs. Who in 1990, just one year before Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, could have predicted the arrival of the Internet as a consumer experience, destroying the giants of the online world (Prodigy, Compuserve)? Sometimes it's driven by economic tipping point.
Economist Robert Picard has graphed the transition points at which print becomes cash-negative (and is supported by online profits), and print becomes unsustainable (and presumably is dropped by newspapers, unless they simply cease to exist). These are theoretical transitions and Picard provides no guidance as to dates and levels of revenue. But what Picard's analysis tells us is that change will not come in a state of continuous slow decline; at some point it will be fast and vicious. For some newspapers with severely sagging market penetration, it could come at any moment. You can't run a mass medium business model if you're not a mass medium.
Shoot, if you believe Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, we're coming up on the Singularity anyway.