Back to the future: were newspaper publishers wrong to go digital?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/oct/19/back-to-the-future-were-newspaper-publishers-wrong-to-go-digital

The article discusses in how in theory turning to digital news instead of staying with newspapers might have been a bad idea. The article presents objective statements using facts such as "US newspaper industry digital advertising revenue increased from $3bn to only $3.5bn from 2010 to 2014." as opposed to "... print revenues plunged from $22.8bn to $16.4 bn over the same period, they still represented 82% of total newspaper revenue." Comments were made, describing newspaper websites to be "less than satisfactory" and that it would essentially fail to "sustain our culture". 

Facts:

• US newspaper digital advertising revenue went from $3bn to only $3.5bn in a 4 year gap between 2010 - 2014
• US newspaper print revenues decreased frm $22.8bn to $16.4bn over the same period
• Facts were based on 51 leading US regional newspaper institutions 
•  25-35% profit margins will never return and be happy with the 5% margins common in other companies

It is without a doubt that an 'only' half a billion in digital advertising revenue between a 4 year period seems to not translate to their linear growth that we would expect as with their presence the digital age that they've taken by storm, but this is most influenced and declined by ad blocks as we know, which news websites can't do anything about as the option to turn it off or on it up to the user. However again, this doesn't conclude with this one reason to mean that going digital wasn't necessarily a good idea, but that it was at least a good move to change with the times and dynamics, and evolve the industry.