The changing landscape for multi access portals

Abstract

Discusses the factors that have made life difficult for consumer portal operators in recent years causing them, like others in the telecommunications, media and technology sector, to take a close look at their business models following the dot.com crash and the consequent reassessment of Internet-related project financing by the venture capital community. While the pressure is on to generate income from existing customers and users, portal operators must reach new markets and find realistic revenue streams. This search for real revenues has led to a move towards charging for content, a strategy being pursued by a large number of horizontal portal players, including MSN and Terra Lycos. This trend is particularly noticeable in China, where Chinadotcom operates a mainland portal and plans a range of fee-based services, including electronic mail. The nature of advertising itself is changing, with portals seeking blue-chip sponsorship and marketing deals that span a number of years. Players are struggling to redefine and reinvent themselves as a result of the changing environment and even the term “portal” is believed to be obsolete, partly due to its dot.com crash associations. Multi-access portals are expected to dominate the consumer sector, becoming bigger and better overall than their predecessors and playing a more powerful role in the consumer environment. The current generation of business-to-consumer (B2C) portal types generally fall into one of the following categories: horizontal; niche or vertical; wireless; voice; and TV. The future for portals is expected to lie with the development of the multi-access consumer portal market and will probably take place in three key stages: testing the waters (2001-2002); a wave of confidence (2003-2004); and sophistication filtering out (2005-2006). Partnerships of various kinds will be vital to success and the most important arrangements will be those that provide the portal with access to technology, networks, content or services that it does not have in-house.