Ziff Davis (previous owner of ZDNet.com before it sold to CNET.com many years ago) filed for bankruptcy this week. In one of the two files available for download that outline the legal framework under which they filed, Ziff Davis says:

As a result of declining advertising and subscription revenues, the debtors experienced a decline in total annual revenues from approximately $300 million in 2001 to approximately $76 million in 2007.

This was in large part caused by the move of technology advertisers to the Web at the same as the company still concentrated on print media (it had already relinquished its main online Web presence a while ago). Print media is far from dead, especially in China where only about 15% of the population is online, but the technology sector is an altogether different beast — tech buyers are always the early adopters and they started relying on digital media long before other sectors did (or have). It's for this reason that Web-only companies like Jupitermedia/internet.com and Marketwatch.com were able to increase in both revenue and value so quickly — technology buyers and investors alike relied on the Internet and the advertising that went along with it for their primary source of information (JUPM's Alan Meckler gives a history of his own bid to buy ZD here).

Our own ChinaTechNews.com property creates only about one-sixth as much annual revenue as Questex's ComputerWorld Hong Kong businesses, but we have a pure Internet-based media business with far lower overheads, so a dollar invested in ChinaTechNews.com yields a better percentage on returns than a dollar invested in a print-heavy publication covering the same tech sector. Each time a tech magazine is published, the owners are betting that they can make back (plus some) their money they invested in the printing of that magazine; for Web publishers, the financial risk of publishing "an issue" of a website is far lower (approaches zero sometimes). Plus advertisers enjoy digital media better — they can easily tweak their ads and the lead time for ad placement can be measured in minutes/hours instead of weeks. But I'm probably preaching to the converted.

One other area that is rarely touched on is that many of these old-school media companies are managed by journalists and writers who concentrate more on crafting a finely tuned article than getting more news out. This is definitely not to say that there is not value in writing finely edited pieces, but they must be balanced online with enough daily content to keep readers and advertisers continuously coming back. Schlock and shock needs to be balanced with good writing stock. It's a delicate balance that many folks definitely understand but don't adhere to, to the detriment of their ad dollars, eyeballs, and brand. It's one reason why I think Gannett, McClatchy Company and the Tribune Company were smart to invest in Topix.com — I visit NYTimes.com a couple times a day, but read Topix about once an hour.

P.S. As it is March 8, Happy International Women's Day!