IS GCTY for sale?
news.com
For some companies, such
as GeoCities, community
building forms the
foundation of their
service, while other
Internet portals--such as
Yahoo, Excite, AOL.com,
MSN.com, and Lycos,
have added community to
their offerings in hopes of
attracting a wider
audience.
While Internet portals are among the most popular
sites on the Web, competition among them is fierce,
and they must work constantly to retain millions of
users visiting their sites each day. Thus far, the
community gamble seems to have paid off for portals
such as Lycos, which acquired home page
communities Tripod and Angelfire earlier this year.
Indeed, Lycos vaulted past competitor Excite in
audience reach after its acquired those two services,
as well as Wired Digital and WhoWhere, according to
Jupiter Communications.
Yahoo and Excite, for their part, have made their
own bids to bolster their offerings, releasing rival
"community builders" within days of each other this
summer. The additions give users of the sites the
ability to create and categorize their own
communities, and, in return, the portals gain the
opportunity to sell targeted advertising to
communities targeted at specific audiences and to
collect demographic data about people using the
community building services. |
