THE SUN and the News Of The World will get 50% of their non-cover price income from digital sources within five years, according to their managing director Mike Anderson.

Scots-born Anderson referred to seven customer-facing ventures aimed to be the key drivers of this growth, including bingo, dating and betting as well as a move to exploit BSkyB's Premiership football rights with Sun-branded mobile-phone football action.

He later stressed that it was these areas and not online advertising that would produce the growth, even though the company does hope to make limited search engine revenues from its Sun Local websites.

Speaking at the Scottish Media Forum, which was organised by trade title The Drum and took place in Glasgow on Friday, he said that the success of the new ventures would depend on the newspapers continuing to sell enough copies to keep the brands attractive.

"All of the digital income is dependent on how big we can keep the newspaper business ... Our ability to make money from something like bingo will be borne out by the size of the Sun," he said.

With the Sun having just completed a full year of heavily cutting its cover price in Scotland, Anderson also faced a grilling from Paisley newsagent Des Barr during the session.

Barr said the brutal price war, which has also seen price-cutting from the Daily Express, Daily Mail and Daily Star in recent times, had brought his industry "to its knees".

He said: "You don't realise that we are broke. You haven't invested one penny in the independent sector ... Your company singularly has failed to invest in home delivery."

Anderson said this was unfair, saying that News Group Newspapers had spent £40 million on home delivery, which was more than "just about anybody else".

During the same discussion, Jim Chisholm, an adviser to the World Association of Newspapers, spoke disparagingly of British newspapers, saying that chronic under-investment would see closures and consolidation within the next five to 10 years.

"Unless newspaper companies learn to invest, some of them are going to disappear," he said.

He predicted a major fall-off in classified revenues in the next few years, in line with the effect of the internet on neighbouring countries.

"In the Netherlands and Switzerland, companies have lost 50% of their classified in the last five years. So far, British newspapers have retained their revenues better than market conditions would suggest, but severe decline is around the corner."

Paul Keenan, head of Emap Consumer, did not agree with Chisholm's views, saying the problem was not the quality of the product, which was as good as "25 or 30 years ago". For him, the difficulties with printed products were more to do with consumers being used to free online content and free newspapers.