Wired On Friday: At a recent after-work party on a balmy summer evening near London's Victoria station, a gathering of some of Britain's oldest veterans of internet media took place.
It was the annual charity-giving gathering of Net Vets, an ad-hoc association of some of the biggest beasts of Britain's new media scene of the past 10 years.
Here you would find not journalists or geeks, but hard-core business people who helped create the commercial internet boom that swept Britain in the mid-to late 1990s.
There was Mr Tom Bowman, who started out as an evangelist of new media at Ziff Davis, commercialising it's nascent online service, and eventually became head of Microsoft's online sales for Europe.
Under the marquee, dishing out champagne, could be found Mr Andrew Walmsley, one half of the duo (with Mr Charlie Dobres) who created I-Level, Britain's largest independent buyer of online media.
Sitting nearby was Ms Deborah Loth who, at Intermedia, set up one of the first Web agencies, went on to create Lowe Digital and now heads up digital strategy for OneWorld.org.
Promoting the charity auction was Ms Carol Dukes, who headed up one of the earliest new-media sales houses, built Carlton Television's interactive business, went on to set up ThinkNatural.com and works with Trinity Mirror.
Net Vet organiser Mr Bill Gash, who left the safe confines of television to take on Yahoo UK and now works in interactive television, was there too, as was Mr Steve Bowbrick, one half of another dynamic duo (with Mr Ivan Pope) that created Webmedia, the largest first-generation Web design and marketing agency, and founder of Another.com, the world's first paid-for Web e-mail service.
Every one of them was, and is, a dyed-in-the-wool media person, interested in using the Net to generate audiences, sell advertising or market products.
Unlike the venture capitalists and the carpet-bagging dotcommers, the new-media crowd came in from traditional publishing and marketing to populate the Internet as a media platform. These were the people present at the birth of what has become the "fourth medium" after print, radio and television.
So where is the fourth medium now? Arguably it's taken a lot longer to arrive than many had hoped. Despite millions of people online, the revenues generated on the internet have been largely in the field of access and e-commerce. For media owners and publishers the pickings were rich while the funding and the flotations were there, but the advertising revenues - unless you are in the top 10 of websites visited - has been thinner than spider silk.
The reality is that online advertising's share of the total British advertising market grew from 1.2 per cent or £165.7 million sterling (€235 million) in 2001 (the real bear year) to 1.4 per cent last year or £196.7 million, according to the latest report from the Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB) survey of its members.
In the last quarter of 2002, online had a 1.7 per cent share of the total advertising spend in Britain. In other words, press, radio and TV attract 98 per cent of all advertising in Britain.
On face value, the internet barely qualifies as the "fourth medium". But this is not quite the correct picture.
The IAB research indicated that there was more spend last year than at the height of the dotcom boom. The real money, it appears, has since flooded in from traditional advertisers gradually being won over.
The internet is still the fastest-growing advertising medium in history. Even in these depressed times, it is growing three-times faster than the advertising industry as a whole, overtaking outdoor advertisements over a year ago and recently overtaking cinema advertising in the UK.
But, despite all this, there is still a sense that, as a medium, it remains on the B-list. In media circles, Murdoch, News International, the BBC, ITV, CNN and Al-Jazeera are the words you hear time and again, not AOL, Freeserve, MSN or Salon.com.
New media is still a ghetto of sorts. Would Mr Rupert Murdoch appear in newspaper power lists if he only owned TheSun.co.uk, instead of the paper as well? No. But new media is stirring. The numbers are starting to tell a different story of media consumption.
Although admittedly not independent, a study by Freeserve recently found that more than 10 per cent of the average person's media consumption was online. This rings true - how many millions of us use the Net at home and at work, for hours at a time?
Search engines are gradually finding traditional firms knocking on their doors, as audiences desert evening television in favour of the Net.
And while the personal publishing revolution, blogging, is attracting a lot of attention, it's the linking of blogs to mobile phones - far more widespread than PCs - which is exciting many commentators.
Online publishers also are gradually finding ways to move online up the agenda. The Financial Times recently announced 50,000 subscribers, helping to prove that it is possible to charge a fee for quality content.
In the US, newspapers are going back to earlier ideas about digital publishing and selling their newspapers online.
In Britain, a tiny weekly e-mail newsletter, TheFridayThing.co.uk, managed to persuade many of its 75,000 readers to pay £10 a year. It even plans to launch a print title.
New media is on the move, and - with the help of broadband - is slowly growing into the kind of animal envisaged by those Net Vets all those years ago.
Mike Butcher edits mbites.com
