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Six months into his stint as senior vice president of marketing at Disney Online, Chuck Davis has managed to keep hunchbacks, Native American cartoon babes and animated mice off the walls of his office. He does, however, allow one piece of children's artwork to hang here, at eye level across the room from his desk.

It's a drawing by his son Jared. There's a man standing atop a hill strewn with yellow stones. Says Davis, "He's digging for gold fossils."

The image is apt, even if 5-year-olds don't think metaphorically. Till now, Davis has spent most of his career (past age 21, anyway) mining circulation lists, whether at Life, Sports Illustrated or TV Guide. At Disney, he has been assigned to find gold in the entertainment giant's Internet sites, and seems poised to do so.

Disney clearly has the funding, talent and brand recognition to strike pay dirt with its cyberspace ventures. And so far, its two Web sites, Disney.com and Family.com, have been something of a hit. The former, now six months old, has been the only studio venue among the top 50 Web sites ranked by PC Meter. It was also a critical favorite of USA Today's reviewers. Meanwhile, Family.com has received kudos for its national network of parenting information.

Still, it would appear Disney has sent Davis into the wilds of the cyber-frontier with the corporate version of pickax and shovel.

Davis' office is in Glendale - the next town over from Burbank, where the rest of Disney resides. It's in an unmarked, unremarkable four-story building labeled with a single decal on the front door. It's in a division occupied by 150 people (the rest of Disney numbers 90,000), and when you mention Davis' name to publicists in other company divisions, such as video, the reaction is, "Who?"

Even Davis has called himself the "Lewis and Clark of new revenue streams." Because as he well knows, making waves on the Web is a lot easier than making money. And making money will likely demand innovative marketing.

"The common wisdom is, in order to have the least red ink possible [on the Internet], you have to build three revenue streams: advertising, subscriptions and transactions," says John Nardone, director of media and research at Modem Media, Westport, CT. So far, Disney has channeled just two of those streams - advertising and transactions - into place.

On the advertising front, Disney.com has lured AT&T, Toys 'R' Us and others, while Family.com has drawn Tide, Kodak and Hewlett-Packard. Plus, Disney has myriad products to sell - everything from theme-park tickets to Festival of Fools toy tents. Although online shoppers currently are small in number (only about 10% to 15% of Netizens have actually shopped online), Disney's good name gives it at least the potential to pick up transactions.

The final Web marketing challenge, however, is Davis' biggest. Only a handful of Web sites (including those of ESPN and the Wall Street Journal) have paid subscribers. Moreover, Web-user demographics aren't exactly in Disney's favor. Only 11% of households have online capability, and only 1% or 2% actively surf the Web. Of those, at least 70% are men, most between 18 and 40. That's generally not the audience for the adventures of Buzz Lightyear and Pocahontas.

But Davis has a theory about getting the Web to work. It's direct marketing. "Until recently, the best place to let out your direct marketing juices was in publishing," he says. "But in the last six months, as online has opened up, the Internet has become a direct marketer's dream."

Davis is an unabashed direct marketer, a guy who can still pull out the first direct mail piece he wrote (a subscription campaign for Brown University's football newsletter, still in use) and say things like, "Once you're on a monthly [publication] and go to a weekly, you can never go back. You get four times the testing opportunities!"

Therein for Davis lies the thrill of the Web. Although he hadn't even owned a home PC when recruited from TV Guide by Disney Online president Jake Winebaum (an old Time Inc. colleague), Davis didn't take long to recognize the Internet's possibilities.

Just watch, for instance, as he calls up a site of film listings. Instantly, the screen rattles off movie theaters in his neighborhood. "Look!" he says, whirling from the terminal. "That's cookie technology!" The "cookie," a tracking device, had tracked Davis' last visit to the site and remembered his preferences.

Obviously, that spells one-to-one marketing fodder, the kind of thing that gets a fanatic going. Davis also likes what the Web offers in contact-building (through electronic sweepstakes, contests, news, messages, special events and friendly reminders) and selling.

"The opportunity in [Internet] cataloging is dis-intermediation," he says. "We're going to take out the middleman." That means transactions of the future can be fast, personalized and of course, direct.

At the moment, Disney.com and Family.com seem far from direct marketing nirvana - but not so far in Davis' eyes.

Take Family.com. Under the direction of Susan Wyland, former editor of Martha Stewart Living, Family.com is essentially a large compendium of local parenting magazines, along with local listings of children's events and services. That means parents can see what's happening in their hometowns and find out which state fairs, movie theaters, carnivals and restaurants they can attend while traveling with their kids.

Davis is mum on Family.com's future, but the possibilities are obvious. It's easy to see, for instance, how a mom with two kids in Skokie, IL, could call up Family.com and be greeted with a rundown of goings-on in Skokie that day. Or, she could receive individualized information on, say, sibling rivalry or getting kids to sleep. She might see notices from Skokie daycare centers, or special ads from local children's stores. In short, she'd find the site tailored for her alone - and that might warrant a paid subscription.

Then there's Disney.com. To date it's been mainly a promotional site, as Davis freely admits. (In fact, DIRECT panned the site in its July 1996 issue's Interactive section.) You find references aplenty to Hunchback products, "Toy Story" games, theme park news and the like. It may be bright and fun, and may draw "tons of visitors," as Davis points out, but as one source says, "it's one large packaged good."

That's bound to change. Sources say Disney's intent is to create a two-tiered site exclusively for kids. One area would likely be promotional and free to all; a second area, subscription-only, would probably be loaded with content - games, appelets, homework helpers and so on. Since Disney hired David Vogler of Nickelodeon Online (Nickelodeon being the top kids site on America Online) to create the site, Disney seems serious about making it work.

Done right, Disney.com could be a decent moneymaker. Research group Jupiter Communications estimates that a million kids under 18 are on the Internet. As classrooms become wired, Jupiter expects the number of young Web surfers to quadruple by the year 2000.

"The statistics are a little slippery," says Shelley Pasnik, coordinator for Action for Children in Cyberspace, a project of the Washington, DC-based Center for Media Education. "But it's growing at a phenomenal rate."

One thing Disney and Davis have to contend with is the escalating number of Web sites for kids. Nickelodeon already has an AOL presence and plans to have a Web site early next year. Warner Bros. has a children's site featuring its cartoons, and family-oriented sites, like Parent Soup, invite kids to participate in games and other activities.

But the "Disney machine," as a Nickelodeon source put it, seems headed straight for the heart of this market. In addition to attracting big-name online advertisers, it has collected data on young visitors through contests and sweepstakes (the company stresses that it hasn't used this information for direct marketing). And then there's the incalculable sales value of the Disney name. The only question for Davis is, if Disney charged fees for Web offerings, would parents pay?

It's possible, says Diana Simeon, an analyst at Jupiter Communications, which produces the Digital Kids Report. She points out that while no children's sites currently charge for online material, the right content could make a difference. "Once you can play a game or do stuff that's fun, something that has a higher perceived value for parents, there's potential [for sales]," she says. "CD-ROM was the harbinger of what could happen online. Parents had driven a lot of that industry buying for their kids."

For Disney, then, the first order of business will likely be figuring out whether and how to get those "subscription" orders. That's where Davis comes in.