MarketWatch: Will Yahoo be the next network?

Portals, Yahoo among them, are looking to branding to keep the revenue momentum going strong. Branding advertising clients seem to be pretty happy with results, with the vast majority of them signing on again this year. But while Yahoo may touch 113 million users, it does so for a pretty skimpy nine minutes at a time. It's not a lot of time to get much branding it - which tends to translate into long-form video or flash animations - especially given that the users tend to have their own alternate intentions of using that time to find something very specific.

One thing the portal has in common with TV networks is its tendency to claim ad inventory is scarce, although much advertising on the network still consists of house ads. MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco speculates that one temptation for the portal will be to develop proprietary content to keep people in the walls of the portal - effectively creating a TV-like network centered on the net.