It's finally happening: Advertisers have started moving big chunks of their budgets from traditional media to the internet, and digital advertising is booming.
  At Google and Facebook, that is. Everyone else in digital is shrinking.
  That's the conclusion you can draw from numbers crunched by Jason Kint, who runs Digital Content Next, a trade group representing digital publishers and content companies.

  Ballantine Communications CEO Doug Bennett explains why he recently launched a print magazine amid building a robust digital brand around outdoor adventuring in the Southwest. Advertisers played a driving role in the decision, he says. 
  As today's media landscape continues to evolve, media groups must remain ambitious. As CEO of Ballantine Communications Inc., nestled in the outdoor mecca of Durango, Colo., my team and I found a media void in a place where you would expect it to be thriving, so we decided to act.
  Our newest entry in support of digital content is Adventure Pro Magazine, which will not only be an extension of the website experience, but will also stand alone as an engaging outdoor periodical.

 Newspapers are suffering an accelerating drop in print advertising, a market that already was under stress, forcing some publishers to consider significant cost cuts and dramatic changes to their print and digital products. 
  Global spending on newspaper print ads is expected to decline 8.7% to $52.6 billion in 2016, according to estimates from GroupM, the ad-buying firm owned by WPP PLC. That would be the biggest drop since the recession, when world-wide spending plummeted 13.7% in 2009.

  If there was any doubt that the future of local advertising is digital, the latest local ad revenue forecast from BIA/Kelsey confirms that revenue from local-focused online ads will exceed that of traditional ads aimed at local audiences by 2018.
  It's part of a digital transformation of local-focused ads in communities across the country, and risks sidelining traditional print ads.

  There's been pushback on that narrative of late, as television rebounded
  There are two narratives that have been emerging about digital advertising.
One is that it's not working as well as advertisers had hoped. They're moving money back to television, where they see better return on investment and don't have to worry about issues like click fraud and viewability.
  And there's been some evidence of that in monthly ad spending reports, which suggest TV has slowed its ad spending slide.
  But there's also an opposing narrative, reflected in the latest advertising forecast from Magna Global. It is this: Digital may have its woes, but its growth is virtually unstoppable. Any move back to TV is just a reactionary hiccup, not a longer-term trend. 

 Consumer behavior changed over the past 20 years, as audiences shifted from traditional media to digital media. The industry experienced massive growth in content production, consumption, and ad spend thanks to this shift, except that revenue for publishers did not grow at the same time. It fell. Massively.
  A lot of publishers, or at least their revenue streams, "fell" through this gap on the jump from print to digital.
  And now, there is another jump publishers face. This time, it's within digital and it is the jump from desktop to mobile. This is why desktop has become the new print for publishers.

  Digital radio's hot.
  You hear it from buyers, who want their clients on Pandora and the streaming radio services like TuneIn.
  You hear it from analysts, who say the future of the industry is in connected cars that will give riders the option to digitally tune their tunes.
  You see it with consumers, who are gobbling up subscriptions to Spotify and Apple Music and Audible.
  Here's where you don't see it, though: In ad dollars.

  Google now has the option to combine everything it knows about you from its Gmail, YouTube and other applications - including personally identifiable information - with all of your web browsing habits collected using DoubleClick. 

  This has been the new normal since June, when Google made a small change to its privacy policy.

  Jon Werther, president of Meredith's National Media Group, answers queries about guaranteed ad effectiveness programs, the future of print, and more.