KLP, these portal comparisons are sort of what I'm starting to do almost full time, but enough about me. It's true that cool content would be a nice feature to have in the GNET arsenal, but it could be more urgent for them to find important functionality such as in the e-mail category we discussed on the thread earlier. With their limited resources (yes compared to Yahoo or AOL they really are limited), GNET may make acquisitions but they have to be smarter. This is actually a good thing since others may have made some completely pointless acquisitions lately.
Sorting thru a pile of stuff yesterday I recalled that GNET acquired two companies recently to bolster the size of Hypermart. I could see them doing more in that area. Who knows, maybe the whole go2net network is just a ruse to distract us from GNET's goal of becoming the largest business hosting service in the world.
I guess what I'm saying is that sure, they could do things to bolster traffic - Lycos has shamelessly sought what I might call "loose" or "dirty" traffic - new affiliate programs, the acquisition of THREE free home page services (OVERKILL!!!), etc... looks good on paper but is Lycos as "big" as the traffic indicates (they rank #4)? Probably not.
One of go2net's content "exclusives" is the Useless Pages. Hopefully they'll move into more "useful" pages. But most of these portals are faced with the choice of whether to acquire content outright (as in Microsoft and Slate, go2net and Stocksite, and Lycos and Hotwired), or just license and aggregate it. Then they are probably faced with more decisions about how to aggregate it, and why they want it at all.
If they're getting into content, too, portals probably need to shape some kind of 'identity' since consumers are going to need to understand 'who you are trying to be'. Let's say, for example, that Lycos is trying to forge an image of itself as being into content, culture, multimedia, etc.
There is a lot of content out there, but I'm not sure any of it knows what it wants to be yet. Case in point is Oxygen Media (women-oriented content network). What does it want to be? |
