Ad revenues generated by US newspapers in print and online have been declining continuously since Q306. After two-and-a-half years, the YOY declines are only getting deeper, as this graphic from Alan Mutter’s site shows.

(Full historical figures here.)

Last week, writing in the Observer, Peter Preston latched on to the latest of Gavin O’Reilly’s bullish speeches about the future of newspapers.

This speech, like the rest of O’Reilly’s oeuvre, focused the worldwide picture (which includes plenty of circulation growth in Africa, Asia and South America). Rather charmingly, O’Reilly suggested: “More adults read a newspaper every day than people eat a Big Mac every year.”

Preston picked up O’Reilly’s point and ran with it:

Perhaps the US and Britain are less typical than we believe. Suppose that we are the ones out of step.

Perhaps. But it’s also possible to overstate the amount that US and UK newspaper markets have in common.

Here in the UK, newspaper ad revenues have been falling decisively since Q308. From this perspective, we appear to be two years behind the US market. But the YOY declines we’ve seen in the UK have been more vicious — generally later and steeper — than those in the US.

Many things about the UK’s ad decline feel different. As Kevin Anderson pointed out at the Guardian recently, the US newspaper business is “very different animal than the UK market for a number of reasons”.

Here in the UK, the notion of two further years of ad declines on the current scale feel like an impossibility. Presumably, of course, this is what US newspaper executives told themselves in 2007. . .