Content Aggregators Focus On Ad Revenue
(03/05/98; 7:12 p.m. EST)
By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb
The hunt for traffic is over and it's time to grow
advertising revenue, according to executives from
major content aggregators such as Yahoo, Lycos, and
InfoSeek.
"The audience has reached a critical mass," said Jerry
Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, Thursday at the Jupiter
Communications Consumer Online Services
conference. "Now, the ad dollars will flow."
Yahoo, an Internet content aggregator based in Santa
Clara, Calif., and well-loved by Wall Street, has
1,700 advertisers on its websites. In December,
Yahoo websites reported an average of 65 million
page views a day.
"The Internet is under-hyped," said Lycos CEO Bob
Davis, echoing his competitor's victory chant.
Davis said Lycos, based in West Marlborough,
Mass., gets 20 million page views every day and saw
visitor numbers grow 50 percent in the last quarter.
"It's mainstream -- now that [the Internet] has reached
the magic number of 50 million households," Davis
said. "And if you look at projections for five years
from now, the numbers are astronomical."
Infoseek CEO Harry Motro also claimed 20 million
daily page views for his company's sites. He said
advertising accounts for 65 percent of the Sunnyvale,
Calif.-based company's revenue.
The success of the content aggregation sites has
piqued the interest of media giants such as Time Inc.
editor in chief Norman Pearlstine. He said the
company is "evaluating the possibilities" of building or
buying a search engine site or a directory.
If the content aggregators are finding magic formulas
for revenue growth, huge media conglomerates such
as Time Warner are having a harder time retooling
what they do for the Internet. Time Warner has
revamped its mammoth Pathfinder site in the last year,
boosting traffic 70 percent, but Pearlstine said it still
"can't find a model to support magazines online." The
company is finding reasons to stay online, however. |
