My second biggest client of the past 12-14 months and 36 months into the future is setting up a vehicle similar to VerticalNet but in China. Some top VERT management folks come out of an organization called Reality Software which I am familiar with. The VERT folks are knowledgeable about industry specific customs/habits/ways of the world, as well as content aggregation and e-business.
B2B has a much higher barrier to entry: need to know industry intimately, first entry embed and weave itself into the business process of subscribing companies, community is subscribing because the members want to survive, first entry is free to adopt any good idea from new competitors and non-related vertical portals, but on a much larger subscription base, e-commerce generates 5-10% fee on volume (but typical industrial commodity may be marked up 50-100% from ex-factory to end-user, so the 5-10% fee is cheap for the 25-35% net savings.
Transaction volume via exchange operation, auction, catelog style B2B, regulatory update, legal followup, industry chats, conference, alliance matching, patent exchange, etc etc, are all matters for survival. $6k subscription fee, advertising, e-commerce revenue, investment banking match-making are all goodies to be gotten by the first entrant and to be kept there by viral growth in subscriber base, transaction volume, name brand (especially if clearing of transaction is involved).
Competitor to any of VERT/ICGE sites will be crushed via shameless Darwinian emulation and weight of expertise, management incentive, money, alliance attraction, while competitor to Amazon.com and Reel.com is only a click away.
Yup, ICGE is worth 100x, especially when 20% of US and later world B2B gets done via net and ICGE has 1% of it.
CMGI will do OK, ICGE will hold GE and DELL and maybe even governments and whole industries hostage (not serious on this point, but just to make a point) eventually. |
