Virgin's portals attract traffic but advertisers are not biting: can Virgin resolve its split net personality and take a lead? (Spotlight On: VIRGIN.NET).(Brief Article)

You'd think that the Virgin empire would be pretty damned good at this internet malarkey. The brand value territory inhabited by most online brands -- young, clean, irrepressibly optimistic -- is in the same ballpark where the Virgin brands like to play.

And the Virgin territory is also about utilities, big deals like transport, gas and electricity, pensions -- Sir Richard Branson's alternative version of the Welfare State. These are utilities with go-faster stripes, admittedly, but then what is the internet but a utility with go-faster stripes?

And yet, as last week's announcements from Virgin.net only served to remind us all, Virgin has been no better at this business than anyone else. The Virgin.net operation is being restructured once again, ahead of the launch (or relaunch, depending on the way that you look at it) of an unmetered internet access package.

The internet service provider part of the business (run relatively independently over the past couple of years) has been remerged with the Virgin.net operation, resulting in four senior redundancies, including Virgin.net's chief executive, Alex Heath. Painful, obviously -- but will it be worth it?

At first sight, one of Virgin's main big picture problems seems to be a touch of schizophrenia, because as well as Virgin.net it also boasts Virgin.com, which, after all, is the most obvious destination for Virgin-bound surfers. Virgin. net is a portal, Virgin.com is ... er, a portal too. Perhaps this serves to illustrate the adage that there are portals and there are portals.

Virgin.com is what is known technically in the trade as an extremely drab portal -- a directory of Virgin sites implemented in a dingy variety of red. On the other hand, Virgin.net is a portal in the sense that it makes a cheerful use of a whole spectrum of colours and there's the added bonus that they are sourced from outside the Virgin empire as well as from within the Virgin empire. It employs the services of journalists who help lend it the aura of a magazine.

Virgin.net is also where you find a button tempting you to sign up with Virgin as your internet service provider. And this is a clue not only to the site's heritage but to Virgin's broader philosophical struggles with the internet.