Facebook's audience and consumption growth is now generating substantial and rising display advertising revenue, with consensus estimates of $2 billion in 2010, up 160% YoY, and it will overtake Google on this count this year

The social network's growing position as the centre of the internet experience is enabling it to become a platform for other services, such as e-commerce, making it an increasing strategic threat to Google, as well as other players in the digital media

More importantly, like Google before it, Facebook’s scale and function has the power to disrupt the digital e-commerce and marketing models built over the past decade

Sky is managing to sustain strong underlying growth in the face of a challenging retail environment, in which it has maintained strong growth rates in quarterly gross TV additions and home communications products

Revenues were slightly down on the previous quarter, but this was mainly due to the January increase in VAT and seasonal variations in advertising spend, while the results confirmed the company’s strong discretionary control over costs

As the period of peak product additions passes, we can look forward to a strong growth trajectory in operating profits over the next three years

VMed’s Q1 results were respectable, helped by strong revenue growth at Virgin Media Business

However, growth in volume, ARPU and OCF, while still positive, is trending downwards, and we retain our expectation of more limited progress in 2011 compared to 2010

VMed’s strategy is coherent; the issue is the pace at which initiatives such as high speed broadband, service convergence and footprint expansion can be converted into cash flow growth

In Q1, Google’s UK gross revenue increased 13% YoY to £602 million (net of hedging gains), down from the 18% growth in the last quarter and in Q1 2010

Slowing growth appears to be due to the weak state of the UK economy, with consumers and advertisers alike holding back on online spending compared to previous years

We have downgraded our 2011 UK growth forecasts for Google and internet advertising spend to 12% and 9% YOY respectively; while search remains the main market driver, online display is increasingly the key battleground

Market data and industry anecdote point to an explosion in ebook sales in the US and UK in 2011. Leading consumer publishers are seeing ebook sales at 10-15% of total sales in January and February, driven by Christmas device sales

So far ebooks had been strongest in niches: romance, business books and frequent travellers. They have now moved into the mass market: few genres will be untouched

This shift brings with it a very different market structure, with Waterstones likely to shrink dramatically, technology companies with little stake in the health of publishing taking major roles and publishers faced with disintermediation and forced to build direct consumer relationships for the first time in their history

UK internet ad spend rose 13% YoY in 2010 to £4.1 billion; stripping out newly included formats such as mobile and Google hedging gains indicates actual growth was 15%

Growth in display, increasingly powered by Facebook and Google, continued to outpace that of search, with early signs that some brand advertising is shifting online

We have revised our growth forecast for 2011 to 10%, taking spend including mobile to £4,400 million, pushing the internet’s share of total advertising to 27%

Growth in advertising for TV and the largest popular newspapers has not spread to local media, with regional press suffering declines in recruitment, auto and retail in 2010 despite colossal falls the previous year

Operating profit recovery in 2010 demonstrates firm management cost control, although the largest businesses have suffered 20% decline in annual profits since 2006

Publishers have engaged in various brand extensions, yet digital and other revenues remain stubbornly low, suggesting the scale of opportunity is destined to be a fraction of that from the sector’s recent past – and that consolidation is an industry inevitability

The New York Times is shortly to switch its free desktop and app services into a part-free and part-paid metered system. We also expect the UK Times to switch from its subscription ‘Berlin wall’ to a similar system

In the UK, quality newspaper circulation is moving into freefall, as smartphone and tablet devices provide target consumers with 24/7 news coverage on the sofa and on the move

Paid apps are in the pipeline for the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail, and for some Trinity Mirror local and regional sites, as publishers enter a new era of digital innovation

The concept of demerging Sky News is evidently a plausible one and we consider it very unlikely that critics of the deal will have much success undermining its appropriateness as a protection of plurality

However, it is harder to judge whether the proposed implementation secures the channel’s independence as fully and clearly as it might

We outline a series of issues that the information supplied for the public consultation does not appear to deal with. We note, in particular, that the proposed undertakings seem not to block Rupert Murdoch, or members of his family, from buying the 60.9% of the shares in Sky News not to be held by News Corp

Enders Analysis co-hosted its annual conference, 'Media and Telco: 2011 and Beyond', in conjunction with OC&C and BNP Paribas, on 31 January 2011. We can now provide a transcript of the presentations by industry leaders from a wide variety of organisations.