Before I moved to London in 2000, I had this image in my mind that all Brits were genteel nobles who wore suits all day long, spoke perfect English and lived in 18th-century, Jane Austen-esque country estates with a staff of devoted butlers and other servants. In other words, I thought that the Brits would look and live like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet.

But over the last few months, I’ve been appreciating just how aggressive the stereotypically stiff-upper-lip Brits are when it comes to adapting their traditional businesses to the Internet’s disruptive pull. The Brits are very thoroughly modern, and apparently more so than the country that created and initially popularised the Internet (though it should be noted that it was a Brit, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, that gets the credit for inventing the world wide web by creating the first HTMLs and web pages).

Why do I think that the Brits might get a jump on my paisanos?

First, I was skimming eMarketer yesterday, and I came across a few interesting facts:

• The online advertising market in the UK is the strongest in the world and expanding at a steady pace. In fact, Internet ads are expected to represent 18% of all UK advertising spending in 2007—more than double the percentage in the US, or in any other European country.
• Internet advertisements in the UK are among the most innovative in the world.
• The UK will accounts for more than 1/2 of all online ad spending in Western Europe, and that share will rise to 52.6% of regional online spending by 2010 (amounting to about €6.1 billion).

Second, there was the Wall Street Journal article that I wrote about yesterday noting that the Brits (via the BBC) have taken “what may be the boldest online broadcasting push by a large television network” by launching their iPlayer. As the Wall Street Journal notes in apparent awe, the US companies have been taking baby steps while the Brits are taking relatively giant leaps.

Finally, today, I’ve been reading Marc Andreessen’s blog (one of the best entreprenurial blogs out there) and he recounts an episode about an LA Times column by Patrick Goldstein that got killed this past weekend by his bosses. Goldstein had argued that the Times should promote itself by following the lead of The Mail on Sunday in Britain, which inserted Prince’s latest CD into 2.9 million copies, and also gives away music. Goldstein’s reasoning, as explained in a related New York Times article, was as follows:

“While the Times still is a profitable business, our revenue was down 10 percent in the second quarter while our cash flow was down, as our publisher put it the other day, a ‘whopping 27 percent, making it one of the worst quarters ever experienced.’ Times are so hard at the Times that the publisher has proposed putting ads on the front page to generate new revenue.”

It’s generally known that the newspaper industry in general is in a state of free-fall, and it’ll be interesting to see if and how the various media groups will reverse this decline. In fact, the New York Times reports that the LA Times has had many newsroom shake-ups, and its owner, the Tribune Company, is in the process of being sold. The British media groups are similarly in danger as readers move online and to other formats, but rather than trying to kill the story and pretend that nothing has changed, they’re taking aggressive steps to counter their declining businesses.

For the moment, the American media groups appear to be one step behind the Brits.

It’s also interesting to note how the Internet is disrupting traditional newspapers in other ways (apart from the lost revenue and lost circulation). Before the web 2.0 movement, a newspaper group could kill a story and pretend it never existed. But in this case, it appears that Mr. Goldstein simply leaked the “killed” story to the blogging community, and the article got resurrected after heavy-hitting bloggers like The Huffington Post, Slate, Gawker, and Marc Andreessen wrote about it, which helped get it written about in the New York Times.

As Steven den Beste, one of the Internet’s earliest bloggers, wrote on Instapundit.com. “[Some newspapers are] in the business of killing stories these days, not publishing them. But they no longer have the ability to close the gate because thousands of bloggers have dug tunnels under the fence.”

[By the way, for the non-Americans out there, the title "The British are coming" refers to the warning that American patriot Paul Revere allegedly made about the incoming British troops during his famous "Midnight Ride" during the Revolutionary War between the US and Britain for American independence. Paul Revere is almost as famous to us as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.]