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[media.guardian.co.uk...]
Step one: realise that Nicole29 doesn't really exist and that, even if she did, she wouldn't visit your *beep* site. The only people who use portals are children and idiots. These are not people you should be relying on for revenue.
I apologise if posted already.
Steve
Ivana
In the end it was safe, but as interesting as a tour of Singapore by the government authorised bus tour agents in th 1960's who took you to the "right" jewelry stores without asking, blabbered on incessantly about how wonderful the government was, showed you new shopping centres, and avoided the katoeys on bugis street.
It actually didnt even work well back then in portal mania days - for it to work now shows a blinkered thinking perhpas only justifiable by acquiescent focus groups who are never going to tell you the **real** reasons they use the internet.
In fact MSN even tried to go head to head with "the internet" in the early days, launching the "MSN Network" circa early 1990's, based on the compuserve, prodigy, genie models to compete directly with a more anarchic but natural network of networks. All of course, are brandnames of yesterday.
Maybe another increasingly desparate attempt to control internet consumer to publishing, advertising, and network oligarchies, while astonishingly enough they have still not learned from Google to go with the flow, rather than aginst the flow of the Web as it was designed.
It's a most practical construct sometimes, although it has the special feature that some of the content on those sites will always be totally irrelevant for some of the visitors. But, as visitors are different (they are not just the two demograpic groups he mention) content seems to be there for a large number of such visitors.
And i disagree, it's not just the stupid and the kids. The guy should watch traffic stats before speaking - he doesn't exactly have high thoughts about the general population of his country. Just because i consider myself to be a "fairly web-savvy, smart, educated professional" and i don't use portals (... or do i really... think about it) it doesn't mean that the people using those sites are less "web-savvy, smart, educated professionals".
He even mentions the AOL ISP status, the Yahoo communities, the Lycos chatservices, and he might as well have added the MSN Hotmail - and he neglects the online games market as well. Fact is, people have good reasons to visit portals now and then and they do so. And they have good reasons to go to Google also, as all is not found on portals.
This article is eqivalent to "shopping mall bashing" - just because i can't find my favorite specialty shops at this shopping mall, it's only a thing for the kids and the stupid...(now, do you use it or do you not? of course you do, it's just sometimes the most convenient or simply the place to go for specials or whatever)
What he should have observed in stead, is that there's simply not room for more than a handful of them in any country. It's a highly competitive market, and they are definitely not just doing an occasional redesign of the graphical frontend. The very reason behind them offering a palette of services in stead of just their "core product" is to protect their (high) investments by raising barriers for entry and making cross-sales in the process.
He totally misses the point that this is exactly like any other industry - there are the giants and then there are the millions of smaller firms that each is more efficient than the others for special purposes. It's a tale of an industry developing and becoming mature, not one of a large conglomerate that doesn't focus.
/claus
edit: typos
