ITV, the broadcaster of Coronation Street, gave its most dire advertising warning so far yesterday as it announced a significant shake-up of its web operation and said that stars’ pay had peaked.

Television advertising revenues for the broadcaster will fall 9 per cent in the critical Christmas quarter and are unlikely to recover in the first few months of 2009.

John Cresswell, chief operating officer, said that December bookings were down close to 10 per cent, making it weaker than both October and November. Two of ITV’s most popular shows, The X FactorandI’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here, are shown in December.

The gloomy forecast came as ITV parted company with Jeff Henry, the director of its internet operations who also helped to devise controversial late-night phone-ins, in a restructuring brought on by flagging online growth. It is expected that he will receive a six-figure payoff.

Mr Henry was responsible for the ITV Play quizzes, in which viewers were encourage to call and guess that Rawlplugs and a balaclava might be among the items found in a women’s handbag.

Mr Cresswell said that Mr Henry’s departure came about because it was time to integrate ITV’s websites into the heart of its business. “It is quite usual for large companies to set up an incubator unit, but it is also clear that ITV.com is driven by ITV1 editorial – soaps, entertainment, sport and daytime television,” he said.

The days of rapidly escalating salaries for stars are over, Mr Cresswell said. “The heat has gone out of the talent market and we will no longer have the salary inflation we have seen. We will pay what we need to pay, but we can’t afford to overpay.”

ITV’s best-paid talent includes The X Factor’s Simon Cowell, who is thought to have agreed a £20 million three-year contract in December 2006, while Ant and Dec are said to have secured £15 million each in a “golden handcuffs” deal.

Independent forecasters are estimating that television advertising will be down by 5 to 6 per cent in 2009, and gave a warning that growth in online advertising was slowing because of the downturn and a wider oversupply of “whitespace” graphical advertising.

However, ITV’s online revenues, including advertising, showed modest year-on-year growth of 6 per cent to £25 million in the first nine months of the year.

The slowdown in online advertising growth comes as viewing to ITV’s long underperforming sites showed signs of improvement. In October, unique visitors to ITV.com jumped to 8.2 million, ahead of the nine-month average of 5.9 million, helped as viewers turned to the web to watch more Coronation Street and X Factor content.

When Liam Connor was murdered last month on Coronation Street after an affair, ITV filmed three alternative endings and put them on its website. They were watched 650,000 times, mostly soon after the murder episode was transmitted.

During October, ITV.com streamed 12.1 million videos, and advertising on ITV.com and its local news websites were ahead 40 per cent.

Ian Griffiths, finance director, said he did not expect overall revenues to decline, but added that “the rate of online advertising growth will slow”. Online revenues were also hit by a decision to stop charging for access to ITV’s Friends Reunited website.

In the first nine months of the year, group revenues totalled £1.47 billion, down nearly 1 per cent. ITV’s channels generated £1.2 billion of that, down 5 per cent, as advertising income fell.

Independent production, where ITV makes programmes for broadcasters in the UK and abroad, improved 35 per cent to £206 million.

However, worries about a continuing decline in advertising revenue prompted brokers to voice concerns that forecasts for 2009 could be revised downwards, and the dividend, already cut back, may still be under pressure.

The shares, which had traded down most of the day, ended marginally ahead, up ¼p at 31½p.

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