When the dotcom bubble burst, the collective sigh of relief from Fleet Street was almost audible as publishers pushed the digital conundrum back onto the waiting list.
But now, some seven years later, the online advertising market in the UK is going from strength to strength, pulling in more than £2bn in revenue in 2006.
Newspaper publishers have finally woken up to the fact that the internet is not going away and they want their slice of the pie.
While groups such as Independent News & Media and Express Newspapers have been cautious in the extent of their online investment, other publishers are greeting the digital future wholeheartedly.
Most publishers have had a web presence for many years, but now there is renewed investment and interest in the potential of the medium.
The Wall Street Journal blazed a trail for the subscription model, with 811,000 subscribers in 2006 paying a $99 annual fee.
With the exception of The Financial Times, which is subscription based, the UK's newspaper publishers are largely pursuing a model of free content funded by advertising.
Increasingly, that content comprises not just words and pictures, but video, audio and user-generated material as well.
The individuals guiding digital strategy for the newspaper publishers have the tricky task of balancing experimentation and innovation with immediate commercial outcomes - the media landscape of the future depends on their success.
ADAM FREEMAN - DEPUTY COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, GUARDIAN NEWS AND MEDIA
2006 - Deputy commercial director and board member, Guardian News and Media
2004 - Deputy ad director, Guardian Newspapers
2002 - Media publisher to head of commercial development for Guardian Unlimited, Guardian News and Media
2000 - Sales and marketing director, e-magazineshop.com
1992 - Client sales executive to magazine agency sales manager, Guardian Newspapers
The Guardian remained committed to the internet throughout the days of the dotcom bust and is now reaping the rewards.
While its print edition is only the third biggest newspaper in the quality market, Guardian Unlimited is the most visited British newspaper website, according to ABCE figures.
The publisher has continued to innovate on the web, offering an array of services to the reader ranging from podcasts to Sudoku.
Freeman says the name change from Guardian Newspapers to Guardian News and Media is indicative of the publisher's intentions.
The company merged the online and offline recruitment ad sales teams three years ago, enabling the company to successfully transfer its huge job classifieds business to the web, becoming one of the top three job sites in the UK.
In January, that approach was extended to the display advertising business, with the creation of GNM Commercial under the leadership of commercial director Stuart Taylor.
"In that department we have a mixture of dedicated digital specialists, trading teams, client and sponsorship teams, so we can make a more integrated sell," Freeman says.
On the editorial side, Guardian Unlimited is a 24-hour operation and the company is currently working through the process of how to organise its journalists and whether to maintain separate print and online teams.
Freeman says it is difficult to recruit people with top-level digital skills, but he believes it is more important to find candidates with flexibility and adaptability.
The main commercial strategy for Guardian Unlimited is advertising, and the company has been investing heavily in behavioural targeting and contextual ads to help monetise journalistic content and community forums alike.
However, the site also has a so-called "freemium" strategy, where the basic versions of services such as the dating site Soulmates or the crosswords are free, but the full versions are subscription-funded.
Freeman says the company is dabbling in mobile, publishing news on BlackBerry via AvantGo and offering its puzzles in mobile format, but admits it needs to do more.
SHAUN GREGORY - DIRECTOR OF NEW MEDIA, TELEGRAPH MEDIA GROUP
2006 - Director of new media, Telegraph Media Group
2004 - Managing director, national brands, Emap Radio
2000 - Strategy and development director, Performance Network 1994 - Sales director rising to managing director, Radio City, Aire & Hallam
1988 - Sales executive, United Provincial Newspapers
Back in 1995, the Telegraph was one of the first newspapers to launch a website. But its current plans to transform a 150-year-old newspaper brand into a truly multi-platform media owner are far more ambitious.
As well as changing its name to Telegraph Media Group, to drop the brand association with newspapers, the company has dismantled its separate digital department.
Gregory explains that the company's web and print operations are now completely integrated in both the editorial and advertising sides of the business.
As the person responsible for developing and executing the company's digital strategy, Gregory manages a huge number of dotted-line reports.
"It's a complex matrix structure," he says. "It's the art of getting people to follow down that route, but the integrated structure works well - we have the best of both worlds."
The group has moved to a new office to make the newly merged print and online operations a reality. The purpose-built newsroom has the journalists' seating radiating out from the news desk in a "hub and spoke" arrangement, as well as fully equipped television and radio studios.
The company has also invested heavily in training to ensure everyone has the skills for the multimedia transformation. Every person in editorial has attended a week-long training course on multimedia journalism, including television and radio, as well as web production, while the advertising department is also being trained.
In a sign of things to come, the Telegraph has already made waves by breaking the story of Michael Grade's defection to ITV online.
Gregory says this proves online does not cannibalise print, but serves a different purpose, since the print edition of the Telegraph carried analysis and opinion the morning after breaking the Grade story, and circulation remained as high as ever.
The group currently monetises its digital operations through advertising and some paid-for premium content, such as Fantasy Football. However, Gregory is keen for the brand to tap into the boom in e-commerce and to take its experience with reader offers online.
He adds that the company is still working out its mobile strategy.
DAVID BLACK - DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL MEDIA, TRINITY MIRROR
2006 - Board member of regional newspaper division, Trinity Mirror
2002 - Operations director and then director of regional digital media, Trinity Mirror
2001 - Business development director, Trinity Mirror Digital
1999 - Managing editor, Trinity Mirror Digital
1997 - Producer, Virgin Net
The complication for Trinity Mirror is that it is effectively two businesses.
"The regional business is more focused on the key classifieds categories - jobs, homes, motors - and driving a strong position in local markets," explains Black, who works over both businesses.
"The nationals are more focused on news, sport and showbiz and how to build strong growth."
While his day job is looking after the network of regional and local newspaper sites and the acquired property business, Black also works with senior management on the company's broader digital strategy.
Much of Trinity Mirror's digital business has been built by acquisition and third-party investment. The company has a stake in Fish4Jobs and owns job sites in specialist areas, such as secretarial placements and accounting.
In the property market, the business has acquired Smart New Homes, a new homes site, and Email for Property, a directory site for estate agents. Black says there is increasing integration between the newspapers and their websites.
Trinity Mirror journalists are now trained for both print and online media and there is what he describes as "relentless cross-promotion" from the web to newsprint and vice versa.
At Teesside in the North East, there are now 10 hyper-local sites with citizen-generated content and the company is rolling out forums and blogs across its whole portfolio.
The publisher is also experimenting with podcasting and video, which it hopes to monetise through pre-roll advertising.
Black says the mobile strategy is developing apace - the company has mobile content for some of its newspapers and the ability to send text alerts to its users to notify them of updates.
With a claimed audience of eight million unique users per month for its web portfolio, Trinity Mirror is keen for the industry to create a combined metric for both online and print.
"Advertisers want to buy reach and they can if we get this metric in place," Black says.
ZACH LEONARD - DIGITAL MEDIA PUBLISHER, TIMES MEDIA
2006 - Digital media publisher, Times Media
2005 - Head of UK publishing practice, Accenture
1999 - Managing director EMEA and chief operating officer of FT.com, Financial Times
1992 - Fidelity Investments, Boston and London
Leonard has specific publishing responsibilities for Times Online, but he also contributes to News International's wider digital strategy by running a joint committee in partnership with Mike Gordon at News Group Newspapers (see page 29).
Although Times Media and NGN run as separate businesses, the two share resources where appropriate and the company recently invested in a new content management system for both to use.
Times Online relaunched in February and The Sun is currently moving its website to the new system.
Leonard says Times Media has realised the importance of search engine optimisation in driving traffic and revenue, with 50-60% of daily traffic coming from search engines such as Google.
The publisher has trained journalists in how to write search-friendly headlines and has also employed a search editor to take charge of the whole file management and collect information on the top search terms.
During the Budget, this information on what users were looking for was fed back to journalists, who considered it when creating the coverage of Gordon Brown's statement for the following day's newspaper.
Leonard says Times Online is making the most of the multimedia opportunities offered by the web. Journalists carry digital cameras to take photographs and video footage while out on the job. This is then edited and incorporated into the website.
The site has been running a video feature called Cool In Your Code, a web TV show on London's neighbourhoods sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and Cisco.
Leonard says The Sun is more advanced with its mobile strategy than The Times, but that this is something the business wants to rectify in the coming fiscal year.
UNIQUE USERS TO NEWSPAPER WEBSITES (MONTHLY)
Telegraph.co.uk:
Feb - 7,199,166
Jan - 7,473,939
Guardian Unlimited:
Feb - 13,761,364
Jan - 15,703,012
TimesOnline:
Feb - Did not report figures (the site relaunched)
Jan - 10,891,378
TheSun.co.uk:
Feb - 8,028,211
Jan - 9,543,772
DailyMail.co.uk
March 2006 - 2,432,103 (only figures available because of different reporting period)
BBC Online
March 2006 - 82,324,555 (only figures available because of different reporting period)
The Express, The Independent and The Mirror are not audited by ABCE and do not release estimated figures.
MIKE GORDON - DEPUTY MANAGING DIRECTOR, NEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS
2007 - Deputy managing director, News Group Newspapers
2004 - Commercial director, Times Newspapers
2002 - Managing director, Virtual Internet
1987 - Sales executive, News Group Newspapers
While other publishers are dabbling with mobile, at The Sun it is the third publishing platform after print and online and part of its core business strategy.
"We have 'best of' in the newspaper, 'more of' online and 'instant' for mobile," Gordon says.
There is a high level of interaction between the website and the audience, he says, and the business model is as much about transactions as advertising.
Users pay for online services such as bingo, diets, dating and gaming, and mobile is a natural extension of this transactional activity.
The group is pushing mobile forward in three ways - building its own WAP site; providing content to the portal sites run by the mobile operators; and offering direct-to-consumer downloads, such as the first edition of News of the World at 10pm on a Saturday for £1.
Print features such as the Page 3 Girl or gossip column Bizarre translate well to mobile, while sport is another key focus.
News Group Newspapers has a joint venture with BSkyB for the mobile rights for the FA Cup, which it holds for three seasons beginning next year.
The highly interactive nature of The Sun audience also makes it a perfect fit for user-generated content such as MySun and SunMeTV.
"MySun is a really interesting example - it definitely isn't MySpace, but it's taking the traditional interactive experience of readers to the web," Gordon says.
"When Jack Straw made his comments about banning burkas, we had 70,000 people viewing the comments and 35,000 registered users wanting to make comments."
While News Group Newspapers is committed to finding a combined metric for print and online audiences, Gordon stresses the importance of an industry-agreed common system, so clients do not get confused by competing audience claims.
ANDY HART - MANAGING DIRECTOR, ASSOCIATED NORTHCLIFFE DIGITAL
2006 - Managing director, Associated Northcliffe Digital
2002 - Consultant, Daily Mail and General Trust
2001 - Global chief executive, Translucis Global Holdings 2000 - UK chief executive, Ask Jeeves
1998 - Managing director, Sunday Business
Associated Northcliffe Digital has developed its diverse portfolio through a combination of acquisition and launch.
The digital offering includes both the editorial sites linked to its newspaper brands, such as DailyMail.co.uk and ThisisLondon.co.uk, and pure-plays such as Jobsite, Motors.co.uk, FindaProperty and dating site LoopyLove.
And Hart says that Associated's acquisition spree is far from over. "If we find a brand that fits into our strategy with a great management team and positive future, then we'll buy it, but we'll also invest in building ourselves," Hart says.
For example, although he won't reveal details, he does say the development team in Derby is set to launch new products shortly. He says the biggest recruitment need is for project management skills, because the company is trying to integrate so many different things.
Associated Northcliffe is starting to develop its mobile strategy; it already has a mobile extension to its dating offer, called QuickFlirt, and is developing a mobile jobs service for temporary workers in the construction industry.
While the newspaper group has user-generated content on its site, particularly user discussion about stories written by Associated journalists, Hart says this has not had a significant direct effect on the bottom line yet.
The company is almost unique among British newspaper publishers for not developing a podcast offering - and Hart remains sceptical about the value of newspapers creating audio feeds.
"I don't see consumers paying for it and I don't get many advertisers demanding that sort of service," he says. "It's a tiny value-add to an overall service, but it's not going to make anyone's fortune."
He firmly believes the web is an opportunity rather than a threat for newspaper publishers, claiming there is no evidence that online is cannibalising offline audiences and revenues.
Hart points out that newspaper circulation was in decline long before the advent of the internet and argues that the web is stealing audiences from other media, such as television, just as much as newspapers.
THE BOTTOM LINE: WHAT NEWSPAPERS ARE MAKING FROM DIGITAL
Trinity Mirror - reports revenue from all digital activities of £30m annually, with a healthy profit margin.
News International - does not disclose digital revenue. Leonard says Times Online has been profitable since 2003 and is on track with revenue projections for the full fiscal year 2006-2007.
Telegraph Media Group - the company as a whole reports an annual profit of about £32m per year from revenue of £350m to £380m, but does not disclose the breakdown between digital and print.
Guardian News and Media - reports digital revenues are growing at 60% year on year, while print revenues are generally flat.
Associated Northcliffe - reports that digital revenues are annualised at more than £100m and the business is "extremely profitable".