More time spent on Web than newspapers: study

NEW YORK - U.S. consumers this year will spend more of their day surfing the Internet than reading newspapers or going to the movies or listening to recorded music, according a study released on Tuesday.

The findings are part of a new report from private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson that shows advertisers are paying close attention to the shift in consumer behavior and putting more money into areas like digital marketing.

Last year, the top two advertising mediums were newspapers, at $55.7 billion, and broadcast television, at $48.7 billion, according to VSS.

But it estimates that by 2011, overall Internet advertising will become the largest advertising medium, at nearly $63 billion, describing the shift as "a watershed moment" in the media business.

"We consider this one of the major findings," James Rutherfurd, managing director at VSS, said in an interview. VSS conducted the study in cooperation with consultancy PQ Media.

Rutherfurd also pointed to a potentially worrisome development for the media industry -- the overall time spent with media declined slightly last year, a spillover effect of the consumer shift away from newspapers and other traditional sources of news and entertainment.

For the first time in a decade, the study found, consumers spent less time with media in 2006 than they did in the previous year. Usage per person dropped 0.5 percent to 3,530 hours annually, according to the study, which said digital media typically requires less time than traditional media.