As an advertising medium, Internet/WWW is currently booming. However, its "foremost competitor for advertising dollars is TV, which is widely acknowledged as the most powerful medium for selling products" (Shiva, 1997, p.2). Two main media, TV and Web are sharing similarities and have differences as advertising media. In that point, this paper tried to review historical development as well as characteristics of TV and Internet/WWW in terms of advertising history.

As advertising media, TV and Internet/WWW share some similarities. As products of advanced modern technology, TV and Internet/WWW are the best advertising media in reach and effectiveness.

However, unlike TV, Internet and WWW were not originally invented as a commercial purpose. Internet and WWW were created as one of the military research projects for the political purpose, and they later became commercialized to expand the global network, while TV was at first invented to be used for a commercial purpose and then they applied at the political fields such as political campaigns. Thus, the main difference between TV and Internet/WWW was from their origin. Also, because Internet overcomes limitations of TV as a communication channel, it is true that Internet and later-developed WWW have more opportunities to expand their communication fields, capabilities and effects than TV had. These opportunities provide Internet and WWW the best current and future potentials to be the best communicative channels all over the world. National TV is technically designed to send message to people in a country, but Internet/WWW, a global medium, can be across country boundaries and connect all people all over the world into the network. So, Internet/WWW should need different concept of people who use it because Internet/WWW's more 'democratic' openness provides people with more power to use and control the medium itself as well as advertising on the medium. On online, people become beyond audience - they are active users with a lot of choices to own, use and manage the medium. They are also different measurement of consumers, production condition and cost, and consumer demographic profiles. At these perspective, they are totally different media.

However, it is somewhat true that as Internet/WWW become more popular with the explosive growths of the Internet user population in recent years, Internet and WWW are similar to the traditional media, like national TV. Already, it is not rare that some advertisers consume a lot of time and money to make and manage their online advertisement on the Web. For them, online advertising is not a less-expensive-promotion-tool any more.