For the major business magazines, the ad recession that set in five years ago brought a lasting hurt, with pages never recovering to pre-recession levels. Pages are down again this year, off 2.6 percent in the first six months, as advertisers continue to follow business readers to the internet.

But as a painful as the declines have been, the magazines, even in the worst days of the recession, were plotting their own migration online, and that continues apace. The sites are in a race for readers, and advertisers too. Publishers see their sites accounting for an ever-greater share of revenue.

BusinessWeek's site will account for up to 13 percent of total ad revenues this year and between 18 percent and 20 percent in 2007, says president Bill Kupper. At Forbes, that magazine's top 10 advertisers are all buying across two or more platforms, reports president and publisher Jim Berrien. CNNMoney.com, the mega-site for Money, Fortune, Fortune Small Business and Business 2.0, is, in Vivek Shah's words, "the backbone of our profit growth." Shah is president of digital publishing for the Time Inc Business and Financial unit.

Nielsen//NetRatings ranks CNNMoney fourth in traffic after Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money and AOL Money, but as Shah notes, those larger sites are also portals to web, chat and general news.

CNNMoney drew 7.336 million unique visitors in June, and Shah says the site, which was re-launched in January, is seeing significant double-digit growth. "We have a percentage of the audience that are readers of the magazine coming to the web site, but we're also casting a broader net of people who don't use print business publications but who check business information on the internet,"  says Shah.

"CNNMoney.com is a very significant contributor of profit and the single biggest driver of profit gains year over year," he says. It's also driving brand awareness, along with print subscriptions, for the site's member titles, especially the smaller Business 2.0. The site is adding new tools, video content and links to relevant stories in its archives to enhance traffic and stickiness.

All this is changing how business news is reported and published. Users typically visit the business sites several times a day, often beginning even before breakfast, and that means sites have to be updated in real time. That in turn has forced the print editions to reassess how they cover news, and the move has been toward more analysis and features.

That's very much the case with Forbes, the print title, and its web site, Forbes.com.

"Forbes.com is far more of the moment, and we are far more analytical," Berrien explains, speaking of the print edition. The Forbes site, which drew 6.471 million visitors in June, ranking it at No. 7, now includes financial video reports, wire news tickers and even a personalized section called Forbes.com Attache, which users can program to include local weather, sports statistics and stock reports.

On the print side, Forbes has launched 12 international editions in the past two years, and Berrien says its Forbes Life has gone from quarterly to bimonthly while tripling ad revenue in the last year and a half.

But print and the web must work together. "The web is an incremental choice for marketers that didn't exist five years ago, so we all have to be mindful that there are other places where they can spend their money," Berrien says. "A magazine without a robust web presence is at a disadvantage."

Yet at the same time the actual editorial operations of the business magazines and their web sites are being stitched together, working more and more as one, reflecting a trend at newspapers as well.

BusinessWeek's Kupper says its new mantra is platform agnostic. Businessweek.com recently revamped its look and navigation and now hosts 11 online channels, 13 blogs and 11 podcasts and posts 20 to 30 new stories per day online. Reporters are expected to produce content for both web and print.

"There are a lot of places where our clientele can receive BusinessWeek content and information other than the magazine," Kupper says. "All I'm concerned about is that they're getting that information from BusinessWeek."

Kupper says the site's ad revenues were up 80 percent in the first quarter and visits are up 74 percent through May. NetRatings ranked BusinessWeek Online No. 10 among financial sites in June with 3.345 million unique visitors. BusinessWeek's web push is in turn creating new opportunities in print. An example is its IN: Inside innovation, a web channel that's become a section in the print magazine. Says Kupper: "The new way to launch a print publication is to launch it online first and test it."