Re: UKNM: challenges facing ISP/portal marketplace

[tim moore]

Depends what is meant by portals - even after quite a while in the industry,

I've never come across anyone with a definitive answer to this on.  Guess

this

could be a whole other string!  But if your talking about the type of

generalist, catch all portal, such as Yahoo, Lycos, Freeserve or AOL, as

oppsed

to specialist portals such as sportal or nusonline.co.uk, then there are

certainly several major issues.


The fisrt is how to make any money.  Internet users spend about 1/3 of their

time searching for stuf, 1/3 of thier time communicating (e-mail/chat

/messenger) and 1/3 of their time buying stuff or browsing content.


Portals make most of thier money through advertising/sponsorship or

e-commerce.  The object, then is to aggregate enough users to make the thing

pay for itself.  To do this users must have a pretty good reason to go to

the

portal and stay on in to look at pages (advertising rev) or buy stuff.  The

question is how do portals build in enough points of difference to make this

happen when content is a commodity (there's f'all difference between the

content on any of the major UK portals)  and services, such as chat, e-mail

etc

are a also a commodity.


I guess the answer lies somewhere between the following:  brand, access and

building a killer app (unique content).  To take them one by one:


Access:  It's no surprise that Freeserve ranked among the top 5 web sites in

the UK and it is also the biggest ISP.  Fair play, they're making big

efforts

to make the site stickier by building unique content, but with out the fact

that their portal is tyhe first port of call for a huge proportion of UK net

users, I doubt if they would be where they are.


Brand:  Again not surprising that the biggest (most well known) brands are

also

up there in terms of visitors.  Fair enough, Yahoo, Alta Vista Lycos, BBC,

Excite all deliver excellent services and some have developed their own

unique

content/search/messengers etc, but in reality they all do very similar

things.

The main point of difference here is how well the brands are known, either

through big spends or first/early mover advantage.


Killer App:  Well, if you can't afford to (it's not profitable to) build a

strong brand, and you can't be the default portal for folk, then by god the

only way is to actually build something people really wnat - something that

solves a problem.  Enter Ask Jeeves, for example.  Launched in March (

Ithink)

and currently in the top 15 UK web poroperties (may be even higher).  They

offer plenty of content and a search with a twist.....  By the way, I also

include unique content in this category, content being king n'al


Of course, if you can get a good combination of these:  brand, access and

killer app, then you're onto a winner.  Great example is AOL whoich has a

great

brand (it hurts me to say this), provides access and has several killer apps

in

the form of the AOL messenger and Time Warner.  Altogether this adds up to

the

stickiest site in the UK.


The above is MHO of the portal model to date.  Of course, in the future,

portals will face several new challenges.  Not least, how to make any cash

from

the mobile internet.  The average revenue per user from mobile phone users,

for

voice only services, is set to drop, so mobile operators will be keen to

increase revenues from thier portals.  Now they may or may not be able to

limit

thier users choice of access to websites, via thier phones, but even if they

can't, they will be the only ones with absolutely correct billing/

demograhic

and positional (where the user is) information on the user.  Since the

mobile

internet is likely to be used for making proximity purchases, the main

commerce

m- portal players are very likely to be the mobile phone companies - not the

current crop of fixed line portals.


There are many other challenges facing portals, but since it's now 6.01 on a

Friday night and I have an urgent appointment with a pint of larger, my

comments shall stop here.


Tim




Judith Atkins wrote:


> I am currently working on putting together something on key observations

on

> the challenges facing the ISP/portal marketplace

>

> I would be very glad of any comments and insights the list might have.

>

> Judith Atkins

>

judithatkinshotmail [dot] com

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