But a host of problems have plagued the industry in recent years, forcing publishers to reconsider ways in which to raise money, including giving more prominence to advertisers by tapping into areas of the paper that were once considered sacred. This month, The New York Times began selling advertisements on the front of its business section; the paper had already been selling ads on the front of the Metro section on Sundays.

The Wall Street Journal already sells ads on the front of some individual sections, including Marketplace and Money & Investing, and last year began selling ads on the front pages of its overseas editions.

In Britain, consumers are more accustomed to finding advertising on front pages of papers like The Daily Telegraph and The Financial Times (which is also distributed in the United States). USA Today, part of the Gannett Company, has run a strip ad along the bottom of its front page since 1999 and now most Gannett papers also run front-page ads.

“As a traditionalist, I’m not thrilled by the idea,” said Bob Steele, who specializes in ethics and values at the Poynter Institute, which studies journalism. Front pages, he said, should be reserved for what the collective community considers to be news.

Coen, senior vice president and director of forecasting for Universal McCann, now predicts that Internet spending, excluding search, will surge to $9.705 billion this year, marking a 25 percent increase from 2005. In the first quarter alone, online ad spending grew more than 19 percent from last year, according to Coen. Last December, he projected that online ad spending for the year would total $8.669 billion, representing a growth rate of just 10 percent.

Coen routinely excludes search from his calculations of online ad dollars; the Interactive Advertising Bureau pegs search as representing about 41 percent of online ad revenues.

Some other forecasters have predicted that online ad spending, including search, will total around $20 billion this year. PQ Media Tuesday pegged this year's total online ad spend at $19.96 billion--a 26 percent surge from 2005; TNS Media Intelligence president-CEO Steven Fredericks also recently estimated that overall Web ad spending will amount to around $20 billion. eMarketer forecasts a slightly more conservative $16.7 billion online ad spend for this year.