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With online media slowly gaining ascendency over print media and attempting to snatch the lion’s share of ad-revenue, the print media is losing its hallowed icons. Business Week and News Week two of the most prominent weekly magazines in the world have gone under the hammer in the past one year, each with an enviable legacy that had grown every decade since their inception early thirties. Now the iconic French daily Le Monde, in publication since the end of the second world war, was sold to a consortium of buyers including Xavier Niel, a peep show boss in the words of French President Sarkozy, peeved with the deal.

Earlier this year the Outlook consultancy report had predicted, that ad spend on digital media at $ 119. 6 billion will for the first time in history outpace media buying in the print segment which will drop to $111.5 billion. The report was based on a survey of 1000 established brands engaged in media buying across the United States. The reason of this shift was because of better online data availability co-relating the eyeball connectivity to the ad spend in the digital segment.

With a jump in ad-spend of 9.6% the digital media is stepping up its act to maximise its impact on the media buyer. The major area under spotlight is the viewer retention time that is making the advertiser cough up big money. It is not only the number of users that your site has today that matters but how long you are able to retain viewers that matter. It is here that the big boys like You tube are lagging behind smaller user oriented competitors. Trying to make up its deficiency You tube with above 4.5 billion live streams is introducing new features like Leanback that will enable users to view videos in continuation without having to search select each time.

In the much smaller but relevant social media segment Facebook with nearly 500 million users has a viewer retention time of over 6 hours as around 2 hours for bigger competitors like Google, Yahoo and MSN. With $2.2 billion ad revenue targeted for this segment Facebook is expected to improve its market share from 20% to 25% this year. In a bid to counter the influence of Facebook, Google secretly invested over $100 million in Zynga the gaming company that created Farmville and Mafia wars that had helped make Facebook a household name according to a Tech Crunch report.

On the other hand the bad news for the print media continues. A December 2009 analytics by the Times.com reportedly shortlisted 10 American newspapers that would close in a year including the Boston Globe owned New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle owned by the Hearst Group and the Miami Herald.

The World newspaper Congress of 2010 to be held in Beirut during 7th to 10th June was called of abruptly as the local host newspaper An- Nahar failed to meet the due financial commitments of $1.6 million needed for infrastructure, security and services. The Congress was later rescheduled for Hamburg and will be held between October 6th to 8th, but the Beirut convention failure due to financial shortcomings is sure to raise questions on the viability of the print media without adequate digital support in the long term.