Social Networks Are the New Web Portals

Posted on January 24th, 2009 by larnau under General Stuff

Not long ago, it seemed that four companies would forever dominate the Web in traffic and ad dollars. Each of the Big Four — Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft’s MSN, and Time Warner’s AOL — attracts more than 100 million unique visitors a month. Collectively the group accounts for roughly 90 percent of gross ad dollars online. So far, so good.

But now those companies are facing a threat to their dominance. I’m not talking about the recessionary headwinds that have slowed growth even for mighty Google. Nor is this about the self-inflicted wounds that have weakened the positions of the other three players. Yahoo spent the last year in turmoil following Microsoft’s takeover offer, inducing Carl Icahn to elbow his way onto the board and then force out CEO Jerry Yang as business conditions grew increasingly dire. AOL is hardly better off. Its former CEO, Jonathan Miller, freely admits that AOL essentially missed the boat on social media and the decline of AOL’s legacy connectivity business. Microsoft failed to acquire Yahoo and continues in vain to seek a credible competitive response to Google’s search advertising juggernaut.

These travails aside, there are bigger threats on the landscape. Today’s massive social networking systems are rapidly becoming Webs within the Web — one-stop shops for a wide range of services (from content to communications to commerce) that were once the unique province of the Big Four.

One-Stop Shopping at Facebook

For example, through a combination of its own creation and that of third-party developers, Facebook has become a world unto itself. Now the Web’s largest social network as measured by active users [140 million at yearend 2008], Facebook offers bread-and-butter portal services like e-mail and instant messaging as well as photo posting and video sharing. But Facebook’s reality extends much further. A partnership with Amazon.com has produced a…

Source: newsfactor.com

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