For example, Atcheson said, Listerine has a web site. How much does a web surfer really want to know about Listerine and related hygiene issues? On the other hand, the same fairly limited amount of content would be laughable for a site maintained by a daily newspaper company.

It can be used in "editorial" or "advertising," though the delineation between the two is becoming increasingly blurry on the Web.

It can be all gathered up on one page or scattered throughout the site. Consistency is the key.

Know your audience, and be aware of its desires.

Web developers' success stories
Bill Koenig, president of Enso Audio Imaging, said his company found a niche and filled it quickly.

Enso is a division of Muzak, the "elevator music" company (although Koenig was quick to point out that elevators typically do not have music these days). Muzak's customer base consists of businesses that use music in a business setting.

Through Muzak, Enso has more than 250,000 songs digitized and offered in a RealAudio format. Enso provides these audio clips to web sites hosted by record companies, music retailers and artists. (Typically, the audio clip and often related images or video clips reside on Enso's site but appear seamlessly on a client's web pages.)

The key, Koenig said, is to offer changing content that draws consumers back to a site day after day, week after week.

Another success story resulted from securing on-line rights to key content and exploiting it.

Espnet SportsZone holds the exclusive on-line rights to broadcast National Basketball Association games on the Web. Geoff Reiss, vice president of sports publishing for Starwave, home of Espnet, elaborated.

Securing those rights was a tremendous strategic victory for Espnet, Reiss said, but just having them wasn't enough -- the company had to figure out a revenue model. His team considered four revenue models, and weighed the pros and cons of each:

Ad-supported

Season ticket

This plan also carries an implicit promise that the site has the capacity to serve its customers at their discretion. "We've still not equaled a broadcast-quality experience," Reiss said.

Espnet's own figures show its customers have a 93 percent success rate in connecting to the live NBA broadcasts. The 7 percent failure rate, though, is too high to implement the season ticket plan.

A la carte pricing

Bundled benefit

Also, it creates a valuable way to differentiate the premium service from Espnet's own free service and from competitors' services.

Espnet ended up going with the bundled benefit option. Live NBA broadcasts are packaged with Espnet SportsZone subscriptions, with customers receiving one free game per week. The free games are by far the most popular ones on the service, Reiss said.

Interestingly, though, the company learned that few of its customers listen to an entire two-hour basketball game on the Web. The average session lasts just 10 minutes, Reiss said.

@ComputerWorld, the on-line arm of the information technology publisher, offered another success story.

Val Landi, vice president/publisher and general manager of ComputerWorld Electronic Media, said the addition of RealAudio provided the opportunity to add what has become one of the site's most popular features, Laura DiDio's @ComputerWorld Minute.

Her feature draws 50 percent of the site's traffic, Landi said. The site has taken advantage of that fact by including radio-style commercial messages in its RealAudio stream in addition to its usual banner advertising on the opening page.

These considerations will become more important to web developers in the near future, according to figures presented in the second part of the panel discussion.

Forrester Research Inc. conducted a poll in September 1996, asking advertisers if in the coming year the web portion of their advertising budget would increase, decrease or remain the same. Almost three-fourths of the respondents plan to increase their web ad budgets, the poll found.

Increases were expected by 74 percent of the respondents, with 13 percent expecting decreases and another 13 percent expecting no change.

The addition of video technology to web advertising promises to make the Internet a more attractive place for advertisers.

Phil Barrett, senior vice president of software products for Progressive Networks, said one prime time commercial on a television network can cost an advertiser $100,000. That same amount, he said, could buy more than two months of video presence on-line.

-- D.G.

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.