Britain's commercial ITV networks have seen advertising revenue fall 9 percent in the first seven weeks of this year, the London Sunday Times reported.

As in the U.S., the fall was attributed in large part to the collapse of onetime big-spending dot-com companies and to uncertainty about the global economic outlook. Jonathan Barnard, an analyst with Zenith Media, which originally had predicted low but positive growth this year, told the Sunday Times: "Things have become more pessimistic since we made that forecast. ... We will be revising forecasts down by a fair amount but we are comparing what looks like a lean year with two particularly good ones."

Source: Studio Briefing