With click-through rates down to a dismal 0.5 per cent, according to Mr David Smith, chief executive of online ad agency MediaSmith, Cnet Networks will introduce new Web ad designs by next week. San Francisco-based Cnet hopes the changes will encourage advertisers and agencies to embrace the Internet as a promotional vehicle. Publicly traded Cnet is the eighth-largest global Web network and a provider of technology and consumer-products data.

The new designs will change the shape and size of ads and provide more animation and fancy graphics. Cnet also intends to change the way users interact with advertisements. Rather than clicking on the ad and being transported to an advertiser's site, the user can stay on the same page and pull up detailed information within the advertisement. The appeal to advertisers, the company says, is that users are immediately drawn in.

Cnet will introduce three new Internet ad styles as early as this week, when it rolls out its redesigned News.com technology-news Website. The most interesting design is an enlarged ad box that Cnet calls the messaging unit. Website content wraps around this advertisement, which displays tabs on the box. Users can view the ad and then click on different tabs along the box's edges to look up product specifications, enter their e-mail addresses to request more data, or view the product from different angles.

This particular ad style allows Internet users to stay on the same page as the information they are seeking. "What Cnet is doing is great," says Mr Rich LeFurgy, chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group that tracks online advertising. "It's trying some substantive changes to the way they're approaching advertising on their site. They're rethinking not only the unit but how the unit works."

Companies including Oracle, the giant database software concern, and Intel, the world's largest chip maker, have committed to buying Cnet's new ad units. Cnet plans to disclose other advertisers using the new ad designs next week.

Internet businesses dependent on Web advertising are under siege. Major Internet firms such as Yahoo! and DoubleClick have watched their stock prices drop on concerns that dot-com companies, which spent freely on Web marketing campaigns, won't maintain their spending levels. Investors and analysts also worry that traditional advertisers won't rush to the Web and shell out big bucks to promote their products soon enough to make up for the failing Internet companies.

"The present banner-ad model is broken," says Mr Patrick Keane, an analyst at Jupiter Research, a New York market-research firm.

That makes the timing of Cnet's new advertisements all the more crucial. While Mr Shelby Bonnie, Cnet's chief executive, says banner advertising succeeds in developing product awareness and brands, he and his team acknowledge that online advertising must evolve to capture the interactive capabilities of the Web.

"You've got to learn how to message more effectively," adds Mr Dan Rosensweig, president of Cnet. The standards for banner ads haven't changed since the Internet Advertising Bureau first established them in 1996.Home computers and browser technology have improved enough to support the kind of fancy graphics and memory-heavy animation that Cnet and others want to make a regular part of Web ads. "This is exactly the wrong time not to invest in the medium," Mr Bonnie says.

Furthermore, the current difficult times that have befallen advertising have made online media companies hungrier and more willing to change, says analyst Mr Jim Nail of Forrester Research. "They've seen they have to worka lot harder to get revenue from advertisers," he says.