Episode II: Revenge of the Portal

The following is also my column on AdAge.com. It expands on a post I wrote last week ...

Episode II: The Revenge of the Portal
Why Mainstream Media Is Taking a Cue From These Web Giants

In the 1990s, there were a handful of big Internet portals. Some, like My Yahoo, became household names. Others died with the dot-com boom. But today the sheer mention of the word "portal" is a reminder of the days of excess. It's a throwback to when every media company wanted to get big fast and become the destination where everyone starts their online day.

In the years since, the internet landscape has changed dramatically. For starters, we have the Long Tail. The web, with its abundant choices, has splintered into thousands of niches and sub-niches. Today, anyone can be a media company. And this has led to a -- get this -- portal renaissance.

Personalized start pages

Web 2.0 has spawned a new breed of personalized start pages (ne portals) that are powered by quick-loading Ajax technology. These sites are extremely flexible and growing in popularity. Personalized start pages include all of the basics -- e-mail, stock quotes, news. However, what's different from portals 1.0 is that these sites are very customizable. A user can add any RSS feed to his or her page as well as custom widgets that add even greater functionality.

Google and Microsoft are building and promoting robust personalized start-page platforms. (Microsoft is an Edelman client.) The two companies have also opened up their sites to developers, but not to advertisers -- at least just yet. This has spawned thousands of customized widgets that do everything from stream the NASA image of the day to eBay listings and more. Other popular horizontal start pages include Netvibes, Protopage and Pageflakes -- all start-ups.

So far this might sound like a re-run of a bad movie, but it's not. The new wave of personalized start pages reach well down into the Long Tail verticals. Every niche and sub-niche can and will have its own personalized start page. In fact, you can already create your own site today easily and share it for free, using FeedRaider.

Mainstream media reaction

Where this gets really interesting is in watching how the mainstream media are reacting. In the last six months The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, ESPN and The New York Times have all launched their own start pages. These sites replicate all the features the horizontal sites have. They still let you add feeds from any other source, but they also make it easy for the consumer to gain access to special content that you can only find on these mainstream sites -- such as ESPN Motion videos or a New York Times columnist's favorite blogs, for example.

RSS is so disruptive that it is forcing the mainstream media to adopt the personalized dashboard as a model for the future. After all, if you can take a news feed from ESPN and stick it on your personalized Google page, you're far less likely to browse ESPN.com. You'll only visit to click through on a story that interests you. Personalized start pages fill this void. They keep sophisticated audiences on mainstream media sites, while exposing neophytes to the exciting world of RSS's limitless choices.

Start-page battles

So we see a start-page battle shaping up in the months ahead, between the mainstream news outlets and the search portals. The stakes are high. These are going to be the places where people increasingly initiate their browsing. This means that the start page will become a critical funnel for advertising.

And next, the TV nets will launch their own start pages, packed with special content that's tied to their programming franchises, such as exclusive video or unseen episodes.

Keep an eye on this space. There's a big battle brewing and the race is still wide open.

Comments

[Andy]

Steve, enjoyed your article and read it on AdAge yesterday. Glad you posted it hear to allow for comments.

I agree about the disruptive force of RSS feeds and the reach of start pages into the Long Tail verticals. I work for a trade association in one of those niches, so I've been contemplating this very topic.

I've wondered, though, with RSS being integrated into Outlook 2007 and the popularity of MyYahoo and MyGoogle whether or not there is long term sustainability of the RSS/Ajax based niche start page. In other words, how long before your audience figures out they can do the same thing themselves in Outlook, Yahoo, etc.? And will they eventually prefer that because of the closer integration of those services into their daily lives?

[memals]

if you think this is bad you want to see what windows Vista widgets will bring.
I have already seen branded widgets that replicate RSS feeds to your desktop.
The web browser is dead, long live the web browser.

[Mike Abundo]

RSS advertising should catch up. It's still far less accessible to small publishers than Web advertising.

[mark]

Ultimately the web is a database and information desired is specific to each user. The future of the how information will be consumed will be around user centered vertical apps where the "vertical" is what the user wants.

We've developed a vertical start page app for those interested in equity research:

www.whiteboxresearch.com.

It provides a platform whereby users can not only get customized feeds, but can also post to their blog and perform financial analyses while benefiting from the collective intelligence of the market.

We think of it as becoming Bloomberg meets netvibes.

I wonder how many sites people will continue to "customize"? Where's the line when we say, STOP!

Ask yourself how many times you've registered and set-up sites and passwords... it was fine at a horizontal level where there were a few places, but is anyone else getting tired of it?

[Alchemist]

The funny thing is I've been thinking the exact opposite: that portals are dying out. The classic example being Yahoo, which locks users in so they can customize to their heart's content, but only if they choose from Yahoo's own offerings.

You make a good point that portals are evolving toward increased personalization where users pick and choose from many diverse sites what they want on their start pages, which leads me to the question, "Where's Yahoo in all this?"

[Grokodile]

As alluded to in another comment, I've got a dozen "personal portal" pages that I go to when they offer something I specifically want.

I was in a fantasy baseball league for the last two years, so I visited the MyYahoo page that I've had for a decade and barely used a lot.

I've got some fancy Google personal page that I really don't care about either.

I really find that I pick and choose pinpoint resources, when I need them. I need to search, I need this capability, I want to search news, I need to find blogs of a certain type, and so on.

There is simply too much, too many places to go, and no ability for anyone to find them all and sort them all according to my needs. Don't we all just have a collection of "works for me" that we keep handy?

[nalts]

How many personalized portals do we need? My Google homepage is enuf for me. It scrapes RSS and saves me from dancing around to multiple customized pages.

I did bother to customize the WSJ page but I can't imagine trying to teach several sites what I want. Too much work.