Revenues and profits might someday have to enter this equation. Just a thought.
mebbe someday :>
I think the business plan is not so much the portal model, but is really a funnel model. Personally, I use altavista.digital.com as my "portal", but I hang around mostly on quote.yahoo.com or messages.yahoo.com .
I think the real revenue model is all the services that we will eventually subscribe to from yahoo/netscape etc. My friend aptly described that "Yahoo! could be anything ... it could be a bank for example". He's right. Personally, I use sfnb.com as my bank, but I find myself following the Yahoo! links to services such as Yahoo! Pager (http://pager.yahoo.com) . Yahoo! has simple, clean, reliable pages, and the few things they promote are likely to be sucessful. I think as more people use pager, companies like Maribilis (sp?) and their ICQ (essentially pager) will succumb to the Yahoo! (or Netscape) monopolistic power. Most internet users aren't interested or adept at searching through the marketplace for the all the alternatives in services. They know that Yahoo! works well in an unintimidating way, and are extremely more likely to use a Yahoo! service than some other, possibly superior service, elsewhere on the net. It's the funnel.
There are things now like Yahoo! Real Estate (http://realestate.yahoo.com) and more to come (e.g., Yahoo! Bank). I think this is the real revenue generator a justifiable reason for the YHOO market cap.
It's not the advertising revenue, or the browser revenue.
Steve |
