****Excite Makes Exclusive Mark On Portal Market
Newsbytes - August 17, 1998 14:36
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REDWOOD CITY, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 1998 AUG 17 (NB) -- By Bob Woods, Newsbytes. August 1998 might go down in Internet history as the "month of the portal," as several major Internet concerns have made important announcements regarding their World Wide Web sites. The latest comes from Excite Inc. [NASDAQ:XCIT], which announced it would go the Web community route by allowing members to build "neighborhood"-like areas that can be shut off to outsiders.
The company's new "Excite Communities" is described as a new free service that lets Web surfers build customized Internet communities. A beta program has been launched within Excite's People & Chat channel for early adopters who want to build personal communities.
Probably the most unique feature of this newest community site is the ability for a neighborhood to "wall" itself off from the rest of the world. A virtual "gated community" only has to choose not to be listed in the public Excite Community Directory to ensure privacy. "Similar to an unlisted phone number, an unlisted community can be used only by existing members and membership is not open to the public unless invited to join," Excite said.
Users can also determine the focus of their communities, rather than having people find a neighborhood into which to move.
Some of the tools Excite Communities members can use to build their neighborhoods in cyberspace include photo albums, group calendars and group address books. Other tools include discussion areas, chat rooms, a community welcome page and a contact list.
The full service will launch with populated communities for viewing and joining later this fall, Excite added.
On the Nasdaq exchange, Excite was down $0.75 at $41.25 in early afternoon trading on Monday.
Many other moves are being made in the portal market, with one of the biggest coming last week from Lycos Inc., which bought Internet directory and services concern WhoWhere Inc. for $133 million in stock (Newsbytes, Aug. 11, 1998). With the buy, Lycos' reach on the World Wide Web expands to more than 30 percent of all Web users, officials said.
But Bob Davis, Lycos president and chief executive officer (CEO), said the term "portal" is probably now outdated, especially with Lycos' WhoWhere buy. "Portal implies, to me, 'entry or exit,' and isn't a place where people congregate and aggregate (like Lycos)." He said the term "hub" is more appropriate, because "we are focused on bringing people online and keeping them there."
Compaq Computer Corp.'s AltaVista portal site scored a major portal victory -- in name only. Compaq scored the "www.altavista.com" Web site domain in the settlement of a two year legal action its recent Digital Equipment Corp. acquiree had fought with AltaVista Technology Inc. (ATI). The spat between Digital and ATI stemmed, in large part, from similar uniform resource locators (URLs), the addressing scheme for the Web. To reach Compaq/Digital's AltaVista, a Web surfer currently has to type altavista.digital.com . ATI's corporate Web site, on the other hand, has a URL of altavista.com .
Netscape is betting heavily on its Netcenter portal site for future financial success. Last week, it inked a major pact with Citibank that, in effect, introduced a new "pay for performance" paradigm to the portal market (Newsbytes, Aug. 11, 1998). Terms of the deal call for Citibank to become the anchor tenant, or sponsor, on Netcenter's upcoming "Personal Finance Channel," in a three-year non-exclusive deal. But unlike other portal deals signed in recent weeks, Citibank will not provide the channel's editorial content -- that will come from Netscape.
The Citibank/Netscape deal "takes a significant step in redefining what is an emerging portal business model; one that is traditionally based on impressions and is moving more and more to 'pay for performance,'" said Mike Homer, executive vice president and general manager of Netscape's Netcenter division.
Typically, content companies shell out an up-front cash payment and received a back-end cut of ad revenues for contributing editorial content to portal sites. Now, Netscape has an incentive to "help (Citibank) acquire customers," said Josh Grotstein, Citibank's director of global Internet and electronic commerce programs, "as opposed to us paying for CPM (cost per thousand) where we have all of the risk on ourselves to have the advertising perform for us." Citibank is paying Netscape an up-front fee, Grotstein said. While press reports have put Citibank's payment at $30 million, Grotstein wouldn't comment on an exact figure, or on precisely how the new payment model would work.
A week earlier, Netscape signed a deal with America Online Inc.'s Digital City subsidiary, where Digital City will provide Netcenter with local content from its 50 US metropolitan markets (Newsbytes, Aug. 3, 1998). Netcenter's Local channel will be co-branded by Netscape and AOL's Digital City, and will be hosted under Netscape's domain. But the channel will be programmed by Digital City.
A company that continues to surprise those in the generally tight- knit Internet community is Zapata Corp. and its Zap Corp. Internet subsidiary. As it continued to gobble up Web sites and new media companies, Zap attempted to gain some cachet in its newly adopted field in its buy of Attitude Network Ltd. (Newsbytes, Aug. 5, 1998). The acquiree, which publishes several game-related sites including Happy Puppy, would also add its management team to a company primarily known for its check writing skills in acquiring almost three dozen Web sites.
A week earlier, Zapata head Avram Glazer laid out Zap's plan for the Zap.com portal site, which he called an "ultra gateway" site. "We like to think of (the Zap.com portal Web site) as the 'roach motel' of the Internet: We want users to go into the Zap network, but we don't want them ever to come out."
"Zap.com will not be another 'me too' site, and will not be designed to appeal to the lowest end computer user," Glazer said at the time.
And Deja News, the Usenet search engine concern that also builds discussion groups for its members, strengthened its newly dubbed portal site just today by announcing a redesigned Web site and increased content depth (Newsbytes, Aug. 17, 1998). The company also said it upgraded its search technology by now displaying not only individual messages matching specific search criteria, but also a list of the most active discussion forums matching that criteria.
Deja News revealed last month its plan to enter the hot Web portal market (Newsbytes, Jun. 29, 1998), and snared former Atlantic Monthly publisher R. Scott Ford as its new executive vice president. Deja News called the executive move an "evolution (for Deja News) from simply a search and archive site to more of a new media focus."
Reported By Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com .
13:07 CST <BR>Reposted 13:07 CST
(19980817/Press Contacts: Melissa Walia, 650-569-2213, Kristi Dyer, 650-569-2031, or Heather Gore, 650-56-2048, all of Excite /WIRES ONLINE, BUSINESS/EXCITE/PHOTO)
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