Failing industry to still be propped up by falling print revenues in 2020

I’m astonished by how many people are sharing this report as good news:

At an aggregated level, combining revenues from the newspaper, book, and magazine industries across more than 50 markets worldwide, we forecast that just 24% of revenue will come from digital in 2020, up from 14% in 2015.

This is being spun as the “resilience of print“. Look much more like the complete failure of the industry to build sustainable digital business models to me…

It’s also a slightly odd argument to be making, given that so many of the new competitors for this market are online-only, with no print component. To what degree are they included in this – if at all?

(And whenever I read about these sorts of predictions, I remember Dominic Jacquesson’s prediction for Briefing Media that Windows Phone would be the number two player in the mobile market behind Android and ahead of iOS by 2013. That turned out well…)