This Globe and Mail story has got to be read with some trepidation by those in legacy media. An Ipsos-Reid poll has found people in the coveted 18-34 demographic spend more time on the Net than they do watching TV.

The catch is the sample is taken from Internet users.

An excerpt:

For the first time, the Internet has eclipsed radio in popularity among wired Canadians -- and tops television in the key demographic of 18- to 34-year-olds.

It is a sea change that experts say sets the course for a major shakeup in the world of advertising.

The amount of time Internet-using Canadians spend on-line has surged 46 per cent in the past three years to 12.7 hours a week, compared with an average of 11 hours spent listening to the radio and 14.3 hours spent in front of the TV, according to an Ipsos Reid survey.

Among 18- to 34-year-olds, the Internet has become the most favoured medium, with the average on-line individual spending 14.7 hours a week connected, compared with 11.7 hours listening to radio, 11.6 hours watching TV and just 2.5 hours reading newspapers.

The biggest loser in the changing media landscape, the poll found, is radio. Three years ago it rated 16 hours of use a week, nearly twice the 8.2 hours given to the Internet at the time, the poll found.

Again, the poll looks at Internet-using Canadians, but it doesn't tell us how large that sub-population is in Canada. Nor does it say how many wired 18-34s there are (although I would assume the answer would be "lots and lots") or what proportion they form of the overall 18-34 group.

Still, that's a bit of a quibble. I think the writing is on the wall for non-interactive media.

Remember Live 8? Many critics raved about how good AOL's broadband coverage was of the event, and how all of a sudden, TV seemed really old-fashioned.

However, television is still the only medium capable of delivering that event to the whole planet.

AOL engineered its Live 8 coverage to support 160,000 simultaneous connections.

In Canada alone, two million dialed in to watch Neil Young's set and the closing finale of "Rockin' in the Free World."

But at some future point, these bandwidth problems will be solved, and watching TV over the Internet will be the same experience as watching it the conventional way. As a result, if you want to watch Live 8's Johannesburg or Berlin shows (instead of giant talents like Motley Crue), it'll be your choice.

Maybe the set lists for events like that will be published in advance and you'll be able to pre-program your experience.

It's too late and I'm too tired to offer a complete manifesto, but a key consideration here is ad and other revenue forms.

Online media executives even three years ago were fond of whining that the industry wasn't getting a share of ad revenue proportionate to its share of ad revenue.

I have to research what the breakdown is now, with the understanding that more and more advertising dollars have to logically flow to online.

But the problem for media executives could be this: Newspapers and other legacy forms still have much higher profit margins than online.

Actually, given the nature of the online medium, its sites may never offer the margins of a monopoly newspaper, because it functions in a very fluid,competitive marketplace.

As a media exec, the reality might be that online will eventually come to dominate, but since the old forms are still more profitable, it makes sense to delay that day of reckoning for as long as possible.

I'm bug-eyed with fatigue at this point. If my logic shows the effects of sleep deprivation at this point, please tell me why.