"Our business is probably coming more from television, especially broadcast television, than from any other medium," said Wanda Harris, chief sales officer for Yahoo Inc., which sold $3 billion in online ads last year.

"Brand marketers have finally recognized they cannot ignore the shift in media consumption patterns."

General Motors cut ad spending on some broadcast networks but agreed to pay $4 million to sponsor an American Online music service, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Microsoft’s MSN.com has landed American Express, Volvo, Sprite and other high-profile advertisers.

Ford Motor Co. began advertising its F-150 trucks on major Internet sites and car-related websites – and saw sales rise 6 percent.

"Marketers are beginning to think, 'Maybe my TV dollars are not as effective as they could be. Maybe I can start shifting my dollars to other mediums,'" said Heidi Browning, media director for Organic Inc., a San Francisco-based Internet advertising agency.

The broadcast networks – CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, UPN and the WB – have already been under assault from cable TV, video-on-demand and new technologies that allow viewers to skip over commercials.

But while as the networks' share of TV-watching fell to 43 percent this season from 53 percent in 1999, during the same period prime-time ad revenue rose 33 percent, to $9.5 billion, according to Goldman Sachs.

"No other business works where quality keeps going down and pricing keeps going up," Monica Karo of OMD, a large ad-purchasing company, told the L.A. Times.

High-speed connections have made the Internet a more attractive alternative to TV. Broadband has reached 25 percent of American households and is expected to reach 50 percent by 2011.

Americans now spend 34 percent of their media-consumption time, both at home and at work, on the Internet, according to a recent study by Forrester Research. That’s slightly more time than they spend watching TV.

Many analysts are now saying that the Internet could account for about 15 percent of all ad spending within a decade – up from 6 percent today.

One advantage advertisers see in the Internet is immediate feedback on an ad’s effectiveness.

TV advertisers have to rely on ratings to estimate the number of viewers watching a show. But the ratings don’t tell how many people are actually watching an ad.

With the Internet, on the other hand, advertisers can see whether someone clicked on an ad and if they bought something.

"We think Internet advertising has nowhere to go but up," said Mary Meeker, managing director of investment bank Morgan Stanley. "The Internet is the most under-utilized advertising medium out there."

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