Act Now and Get This Ginzu Mouse Pad Free!

Getting bored at the office? You can always play bingo for cash prizes. Just fire up your personal computer and point your World Wide Web browser at https://www.bingozone.com, and at no cost to you, play bingo every 30 minutes for cash prizes of up to $20 a game.

Or try Club Salsa (https://www.salsa.walldata.com), where you become a murder suspect in a cyberdrama produced by cult comic book artist Bill McKean. Your job: Find clues to nail the guilty party. Software developer Wall Data hopes that on one of your visits, you’ll also take the time to check out the company’s new software development tools.

In “The Late Shift, Grab for the Throne,” HBO’s Web site (https://www.pathfinder.com) lets you play the role of either night talk show host Jay Leno or David Letterman as each claws his way to the top. If you want to try your luck at winning $5,000 and a free trip to New York to host your own show, fill out an HBO survey.

If you think crass commercialism has hit cyberspace, you’re right. With 100,000 sites on the World Wide Web and 6,000 new ones being added every week, companies are using every trick in the marketing book, and then some, to draw attention to their electronic offerings.

“When you go to Taco Bell, they give you Flintstones figures as an incentive,” said Greg Roach, the prize-winning interactive CD-ROM developer who has put together interactive stories tied to Christmas and Valentine’s Day to attract traffic to the Web site of the British weekly science magazine New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com). “What does Flintstones have to do with Taco Bell? Not much. The key is to get traffic to your site.”

Critics dismiss such tactics as tasteless “media stunts.” But it is a testament to the vitality and growth of the World Wide Web that marketers, capitalism’s shock troops, are applying so much money and creativity to the new medium even before there’s any significant revenue coming in.

The Web used to be a place where the latest graphics were enough to attract some notoriety. No more.

“A year ago, everybody on the Net was a technophile. If you had some nifty gizmos, then everybody would take a look,” said Jim Sterne, a Santa Barbara Internet marketing consultant. “Now that we have mainstream people coming onto the Net, we need new ways to draw people to a site. Your Web site has to be fun, interesting or useful.”

There are, of course, plenty of sites that are attracting the people they want without fancy marketing. Fly Rod and Reel, a monthly magazine for fly fishermen, for example, has a popular Web site (https://www.flyfishers.com) that offers daily updates on promising fishing sites and suggestions for flies to use.

Advertisers like to place ads on these “niche” sites because they know exactly what kind of people they’re reaching. Tour companies advertise fly fishing packages to Belize. Apparel companies advertise special outdoor wear for fly fishermen.

Then there are the “conglomerate” sites such as Disney Online (https://www.disney.com) and Time Warner’s Pathfinder (https://www.pathfinder.com) that draw attention to themselves by the size and variety of the offerings within their network of sites. Pathfinder, for example, estimates that about 200,000 people are visiting the site every week to look at updated editions of Time Warner’s various magazines and other features.

Some smaller Web sites are trying to group together and create links among themselves to compete with the larger conglomerates. The Internet World Broadcast Corp., a Seattle-based company, is establishing Web sites based on broad categories such as cooking, health and law that it hopes will become the primary gateways for people seeking information about those topics.

But many sites, including thousands that belong to smaller companies, have to be creative in generating awareness about their sites and the products they are promoting.

When Wall Data came out with Salsa, a software development tool, Kris Kelsay, the company’s marketing manager, knew the only way to sell the product was to get customers to try it. The company had already put together a CD-ROM sampler and decided to put the information on the Web page. But there was still that tricky question of getting people to the site.

Kelsay arranged for McKean to produce a cyberdrama with attractive illustrations and potential cult appeal and sent press kits to influential “Webheads.” The site was advertised with “Bite the chile to gain access” banners on popular search sites such as Yahoo and InfoSeek. For $5,000 a day, for example, InfoSeek guaranteed 500,000 impressions. That meant 500,000 times each day people looking for information under the heading “software” would see a page with the Salsa banner.

The company recently hit the jackpot when it was named a “hot site” by one of the many hot lists on the Web, and the number of daily “hits” climbed by about 100,000--representing about 11,000 visitors each day.

Is it worth the investment?

“Putting on the drama was speculative. It’s expensive to update each week,” Kelsay said. “But more people see your original investment” in the site.

There is a product tie-in, although it is remote. People who buy the Salsa product can use it to track clues in the drama and more quickly solve the murder mystery.

There are cruder ways of attracting traffic. In what may be cyberspace’s version of an urban folk tale, many insist that some sites weave the words “sex” or “nudity” innocuously into their Web sites to catch the thousands who go trolling for pornography by typing those words into search engines.

A Web site about the television program “Baywatch” (https://baywatch.compuserve.com) received particularly heavy traffic when it put up on its site shots from the swimsuit edition of Inside Sports including pictures of one of the show’s stars.

“You have to find some way to keep the excitement up,” said Chris Le Tocq, analyst at Dataquest in San Jose. “It’s the guy in the gorilla suit jumping up and down outside the store. That’s where we’re at.”

Some of the most popular sites make heavy use of chat sessions. The National Football League saw a lot of traffic when it invited the quarterbacks of two opposing teams to respond to questions before Monday night football games.

Then there’s the Net version of TV’s lowest common denominator, the game show. Stuart Roseman, co-founder of the Boston-based company that set up Bingo Zone, said the site has been getting hundreds of new users registering every day since it was established just two weeks ago. Like its TV counterpart, Bingo Zone gets advertisers to sponsor the site, allowing the company to offer cash prizes to winners.

Users pay nothing to play the game but are required to answer a detailed survey. The precise demographic information allows Bingo Zone to sell advertising that appears only on the screens of people whom an advertiser wants to target.

Roseman said the service has received a flood of mail. An executive at one major U.S. corporation wrote that he plays bingo while talking business on the phone. One writer complained about the 20-minute waits between games, moaning that “bingo-less time is empty time for me.”

Net entertainment can be more upscale, though. New Scientist’s serial of interactive stories at Christmas and again at Valentine’s Day can be read from different perspectives, and offers choices that lead to different endings.

“We’ve always been keen on how high technology influences society and allows new art forms,” said New Scientist Editor Alun Anderson. “We thought our Web site should showcase how the technology is used.”

Anderson said the interactive stories brought a surge of new registrations from Americans, the targeted audience for the British magazine. Although only about 1 in 1,000 visitors to the Web site actually subscribes to the magazine, “it’s cheaper than having to send out a million free copies,” Anderson said.

Roach, who did the interactive story for New Scientist, thinks the genre could be used at a wide variety of sites. Kimberly Clark, for example, which sells diapers, might have an interactive story about motherhood, he suggested.

“People have put all these dollars into throwing up these Web sites,” Roach said. “Now they see they have a monster that has to be fed.”

Leslie Helm can be reached via e-mail at leslie.helm@latimes.com