"Money follows eyeballs" is the standard budgeting method for advertisers, but the logic doesn't always apply: Consumers spend the least amount of time consuming print, and yet it still gets a significant share of total advertising dollars.
There's an old saying in advertising that money follows eyeballs. But that's not universally true.
As this chart from Statista shows, advertisers spend the large majority of their dollars on ads targeted at television, mobile devices, and PC web browsers — the forms of media with which consumers are spending most of their time. But the medium that ranks fourth in terms of ad revenue is print — good old fashioned newspapers, magazines, and the like. That seems out of whack when you consider that while print draws in almost as much ad revenue as the desktop web, consumers spend only a fifth as much time with it.
But there is an explanation — consumers trust print ads more than those in other media, according to recent studies. That tends to make print ads more effective — and keeps the money flowing.