Remember vortals from the dotcom hey days? For those who dont recognize the term, it stood for vertical portals – go after a particular target group, and provide range of services to them – our first business before we gravitated to jobsahead was a “vortal” called zipahead for Indian youth!
Well, the vortal is back. I was at the alwayson media conference in new york yesterday, and a lot of companies seem to be building destination sites for particular target groups. It begs an interesting question of what has changed, and will the outcomes be any different this time around. Three things that have changed massively in favor are:
- Critical mass of users on fairly targeted groups
- Growth of online advertising to support such models
- Maturity of community capabilities on the web
What has not changed though, is the difficulty of creating truly great content at one place, when the user has a choice to get best of breed content at different locations. In my view, that remains the single biggest challenge for such sites. So a college goer may use different sites for his academics need, versus dating, versus sports, and so on. The new model of aggregation of web content adds another dimension to these sites – they now have an opportunity to aggregate best of breed content, as well as syndicate out to wherever the user is (a la facebook). In some sense, the battle for the vortal is really a battle for the homepage.
Any thoughts on how you see this evolving?
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It is amazing how the third point, namely Improved Community Capability of the Web has turned around the scope and shape of Vertical Portals. All of the following are direct results of this:
–>Possibility of great User Generated Content on vertical portals
–>Shift in focus of vortal creators from content creation to content moderation and building functionality to inspire users to contribute good content, and making good content discoverable
–>Deeper engagement of users
From a developer’s perspective, this shift is important, because this suddenly makes vortals a very interesting problem, both technology and usability wise.. Hitting the right spot with the three points above is recipe for surefire success of any vortal, I guess.
-Niraj
http://octopart.com a YC Funded company fits the description.
i seriously think that any company which intend to create content in house , is asking for trouble . they are up against thousands of content creator who are doing it for Free. best value add they can offer is by aggregation and a platform for assigning ranking to content not a Digg like pure play Users driven Ranking but a Slashdot style Moderator-Driven ranking .
Our firm http://www.orglex.com is along the lines of what Alok is talking about. Our idea is to build industry focused vertical hubs using aggregated content such as News, Blogs Jobs, people etc…
While thinking about advertising models and the premium vs non premium argument for different segments, Jeremy Liew’s deck is pretty useful- http://www.scribd.com/doc/35261/Web-20-Expo-Show-Me-The-Money-by-Jeremy-Liew
However, we do not believe that just a display/pageview/time spent driven ad model would work in our case (or probably in quite a few vertical focused sites). There will and should be a business model that makes sense for that particular customer segment.
Nik
Web vortals are back and enterprise vortals are set to emerge, driven by the tremendous leaps in technical convenience and affordability and the competitive need for information advantage. Vortals are poised to become a third area of SEO, along with spidering search.
A few emerging trends could be –
Innovative applications: Bandwidth and hosting costs getting cheaper as they are, highly effective and innovative applications are largely possible. Modern enterprise search software is also surprisingly affordable and easy to use for crawling and indexing both internal content and external Websites — wherever the right information is stored.
Mobile pitch: To help pave the way to profitability, vortals could also market themselves differently. Seeing the ubiquity and faster adoption of mobile phones, Vortals should also symbolize `Voice’ Portals than be just Vertical portals. These services could use voice-recognition technology to let people navigate with mobile by simple spoken commands to check their e-mail, make dinner reservations, or get driving directions. The advantage here is – entrepreneurs can promote themselves as next-generation phone services, which people will pay for, rather than Web services, which people tend to want for free.
Meta search: Content need not be domesticated to the local data base any longer for indexing and searching. Modern enterprise search software can simply meta-search remote search services, under a subscription if needed, rather than license their content and bring it in house. The search results from one’s own search engine can be blended with the remote search results into one overall list. Web meta-search engines do this blending quite effectively. No expensive directory building efforts required.
Targeted revenues: Revenues need not be non-targeted banner ad dependent now. Today, search-based paid listings supplied by the major Web properties or their value-added resellers provide significant revenue shares.
Enterprise utility: Enterprises can now develop topic-specific search portals within weeks, for the benefit of either their own knowledge workers or their customers and stakeholders.
Alok,
It works out much better than what most people would give it credit for due to two reasons:
Inventory rates on successful large properties are out of reach of most medium-small sized advertisers who want to do display advertising. The properties won’t cut undercut their own rates to chase these people, while 100 of these advertisers together makes for a pretty neat pile of cash.
That is where the vortal fits in. Due to their niche nature, they will never command the crazy premiums that even a large-ish horizontal would bring with it.
Secondly, the marginal cost is considerably lower for these vortals. You set up a template for one of these vortals and then replicate it across the others. The first one will cost the most in terms of tech/infrastructure, the subsequent ones will only cost you in terms of people.
Of course, it may not get as much attention/revenue as a successful horizontal, but a well executed set of vortals can easily be profitable.