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BUSINESS GAZETTE, January, 2001 Vigorous competition in the net’s portal race by Paul Johnson, The Dedicated Partnership Once upon a time, in an internet era long ago, computer users would visit Netscape’s Web site for one single purpose – to download the latest version of their browser. This has all changed. Now, like many other large sites, it also acts as a “portal”. The dictionary definition of a portal is “a large and an impressive gateway or doorway”. A Web portal is merely an extension of this definition – a term used to describe a gateway to the internet. To create an online portal can require substantial investment of time and/or money. Successful portals are often updated daily, maybe even hourly. They tend to include regular newsfeed, a search engine or directory, perhaps free software to download, chat rooms and so on. So what is the purpose of such a Web site? The answer is quite straight forward. They generate high levels of visitors, and visitors have value. The more viewers that can be achieved, the greater the advertising revenue that can be generated – just like in the television industry. But a portal is not just a vast site packed with information. It is, if all goes to plan, much more than that. Ultimately, portals often aspire to being the first place an internet visitor goes to when connecting to the ’net. The idea, therefore, is that if a site is sufficiently useful and packed with content that the visitor finds helpful, then the user will set it to become his or her default homepage. If that person connects to the internet three or four times a day, then he or she will be multiple banner impressions on a daily basis. Multiply that one user by perhaps several thousand others doing the same, and you can start to visualise the potential significance. Today there are a handful of key players in the “portal race”. These include AltaVista, America Online, Excite, Go Network, Lycos, MSN.com, Netscape Netcenter and, last but by no means least, Yahoo! (Many other portals exist, often specific to certain locations or subjects – sometimes termed ‘vertical portals’.) Each of the major portals, whilst having broadly similar characteristics, has its own unique look and feel. Netscape and Yahoo! provide an online address book for instance, whilst Excite offers a daily crossword. Between the ten, the competition is vigorous. AltaVista have bought Shopping.com, Lycos bought Tripod and Angelfire, Yahoo! bought GeoCities and AOL announced a major partnership with Time Warner earlier this year. So, where are all the portals heading exactly? This is difficult to predict because the internet, whilst still in its infancy, changes so quickly. Afterall, Yahoo!, the oldest of the portals is still barely six years old. As users become more internet aware, they might come to realise that a major portal isn’t really addressing their specific needs. Instead, they might become more attracted to vertical portals that possibly are more pertinent to their own interests. As bandwidth increases, we might also see the major portals competing still more with the services they offer by providing, say, word processing and spreadsheets, facilities within them. Portals could offer a whole spectrum of applications meaning that your PC would require fewer installations and therefore be far simpler – and possibly more reliable - to the average user. This could lead the likes of Microsoft and of other operating systems to re-think their operations, as the only thing I would need to do my daily PC work, would be a browser. An interesting prospect given that Microsoft are behind one of the major portals. For now, all we can safely say is that the portal race will continue for some time to come. And those portals with the highest traffic will continue to have the competitive edge for now, since they can command the highest banner advertising revenues. Banner advertising in itself opens up another whole minefield of issues - something I shall address in next month’s edition.
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