INTERNET PORTALS

BRANCH PROFILE

Once started as search engines, they grew up to be portals. A portal is your home base on the Internet. Basically it is a collection of services and content all bundled together. You can search, chat, read news, e-mail your friends, build your homepage and many more. The big ape is Yahoo. Yahoo is an example of a horizontal portal -- everybody is welcome. A vertical portal is aimed at certain groups of people; e.g. that are in the same kind of business. It can also mean that a company wants to be a portal for selling one particular product, for example, cars. A good portal should offer you ways to personalize the start page. A bad portal is one you don't return to.

WHY INVEST?

Put simply: the portals get the most traffic, the most advertising dollars and probably the most E-commerce transactions. As long as their user base is growing, they are happy and the shareholders are happy. Of course they have to offer more and more services and content to keep everybody happy but today advertisers just count eyeballs. Horizontal portals have the problem that sophisticated Web users go directly to their pages of interest. The vertical portals have the problem that they are not alone. No big winner yet in the latter group.

We describe the following companies:
Logo	Ticker	Name
	AOL	America Online
	LCOS	Lycos
	GO	Infoseek
	YHOO	Yahoo