This is no cycle. Media companies, looking at falling revenue, are not on this occasion able to look to the future, when the market will swing in their favour. This time around the change is for good, or at least that’s the gist of what Dominic Proctor, chief executive of media buying company, Mindshare World, told the FT yesterday.

“People need to wake up and realise that this is not just a cyclical issue,” said the guru from the media buying industry.

Apparently Google is set to overtake Channel 4 for advertising revenue in the UK this year. And the FT reports that according to advertising buying companies Mindshare and Initiative, the mighty search engine company could be just 18 months away from overtaking ITV1.

Perhaps the TV industry has been sitting on a time bomb ever since the remote control was invented. No doubt you have seen the jokes on birthday cards, the ones summarising the shortcomings of men; their tendency to channel hop often gets a mention.

But, for as long as TV held such a dominant position in our lives, the advertising industry could withstand limited channel hopping while the ad break appeared.

But perhaps it’s different now that the Internet offers a credible alternative and Google seems to be the expert in selling advertising that users don’t find too intrusive.

After all, remember, it only generates revenue from its ads if users click on them. And critics of its software plans, which will entail funding office type applications through advertising, must remember that these products can only work if the users play the game. The model would be killed stone dead if it wasn’t for users’ willingness to tolerate the intrusion.

Recently, talk circulated about Google offering TV style ads, via its YouTube offering, in which revenue is only generated if users made a deliberate and conscious effort to view the ad, extending the pay per click ads to pay per choose to view.

But while Google et al clearly represent a major threat to TV advertising, a part of the continued growth in revenue that the internet companies are likely to receive will be new business altogether. Think of TV advertising as a cake. If Google achieved more sales, then its slice of that cake should grow, and you would think the TV companies would, as a result, see fewer sales. And to an extent this is what is happening, but not entirely. The cake is growing too. This is because the Internet represents a new opportunity for retailers, which brings with it new pastures for the advertising industry to exploit. The net is in effect an electronic highway, and the e-retailer can pay for its place on that highway by advertising, where as the traditional retailer paid for its place on the old fashioned High Street via rent. So in this new media era, to an extent, advertising is replacing rent, and high street visibility as the key component for success in retail