Disney Picks ABC Chief to Lead Internet Group : Entertainment: Appointment of the highly regarded executive is a sign of the company’s emphasis on its online properties.

Signaling its determination to place the Internet at the forefront of its growth strategy, Walt Disney Co. on Wednesday appointed one of its most highly regarded executives as head of its online properties.

The company said Steven Bornstein, 47, will relinquish his post as president of its ABC Inc. unit to become chairman of Buena Vista Internet Group. Bornstein, who earned his entrepreneurial stripes in the early days of cable television as an executive at ESPN, succeeds Jake Winebaum, who left Disney in June to enter the venture capital business.

Bornstein joined ESPN in January 1980, when the independent cable channel was 4 months old. He remained with the channel, eventually rising to chairman, through its acquisition by Capital Cities and subsequently Disney, where he became president of ABC Sports in 1996 and president of ABC in February.

Bornstein’s newest appointment is considered significant because he is known to have the confidence of Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Eisner, himself a leading proselytizer of the Internet as a driver of entertainment growth--particularly as high-speed Internet connections, or broadband, make the transmission of multimedia content more practical on the Web.

“The priority of the Internet to the Walt Disney Co. is a large one,” Bornstein said in a telephone interview. “Being asked to run it is a compliment to me, and hopefully an indicator of the type of resources we want to put against what we think is a potentially great opportunity for our company.”

He takes over as Disney prepares to consolidate its Internet units into a single subsidiary for which it plans to issue a “tracking” stock (one that gives its holders no ownership rights to the underlying enterprise but that aims to reflect its business growth).

He also arrives amid signs that Disney’s Web strategy--centered around the portal site Go.com--may be in need of some fine-tuning, if not a thorough overhaul.

“Like a lot of other mature brands, Disney’s been moving very cautiously,” said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, a Bethesda, Md., consulting firm. “There’s no buzz about Go. I never hear about it.”

Although Go has been heavily promoted by Disney--its distinctive green-light logo is ubiquitous on ABC television--some critics fault Disney for not being even more forceful in parlaying its world-famous entertainment properties to make Go a unique site.

By some measures, Go has been slipping in allure among Web users. Although Go has consistently ranked fifth in popularity among all Web sites, its audience reach--the percentage of all online users who visited the site--declined from 24.2% in April to 22.8% in July, according to Nielsen NetRatings, an audience measurement service. The time spent on-site by the average visitor, moreover, shrank from about 32.5 minutes in April to 22.7 in May, Nielsen said.

By contrast, the reach of NBC’s Snap.com site grew from 7.1% in April to 8.7% in July and time spent by users declined only modestly, from 15.3 minutes in April to 14.5 in July.

Audience measurement on the Web is notoriously uncertain. And by other standards, Disney’s Web approach has been among the most aggressive in the industry.

The company invested heavily in Starwave, a Web-design firm that was originally financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and that produced eye-catching Web sites for ESPN and ABC News, and in Infoseek, the search engine company that became the centerpiece of Go.com. Disney then consolidated its corporate Web sites around the Go Network so that Go visitors would have easy one-click access to sites hosted by ESPN, ABC and other Disney brands.

Bornstein acknowledged that Disney is grappling with the riddle of how to develop compelling programming for a novel medium.

“I don’t think anyone’s doing it particularly well,” he said of the traditional media companies. “I think what we’re doing currently is light-years ahead of anybody else out there, but it’s still far from what it’s going to be.”