Web revenues once offered newspapers a slight glimmer of hope. Not anymore, says a report from eMarketer on the newspaper industry. Online newspaper revenues in Q4 dropped 2.9 percent year-over-year to $822 million, according the report by eMarketer analyst Carol Krol. In total, 2008 newspaper web revenues slipped 0.4 percent to $3.15 billion. And while the recession and the general volatility newspapers find themselves in make it difficult to look ahead—consider the end-of-day sale deadline the Minneapolis’ Star-Tribune is under—eMarketer forecasts online newspaper revenues in 2009 will fall 4.7 percent to $3 billion.

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—The outlook isn’t good: Overall, eMarketer estimates that total newspaper ad revenues plunged 16.4 percent to $37.9 billion last year. By 2012, those revenues will drop to $28.4 billion—barely more half the industry’s revenue peak of $49.4 billion in 2005.

—At least growth in traffic, time-spent online continues: Newspaper sites drew more than 68.3 million monthly uniques on average (about 41.4 percent of all web users) in Q308, eMarketer says, citing Nielsen Online figures. That is a 15.8 percent rise over Q307. Pageviews grew an average of 3.51 billion each month in Q308, a 25.2 percent gain over the year before, according to Newspapers Association of America’s data.