First Women, Then Latinos
Segmented Community Portals are becoming more and more important.
Today’s Mercury News reports: Comcast targets Latinos with Yahoo-like site .
iVillage is a community portal for Women. NBC buys.
MySpace is a community portal for Teens. Murdoch buys.
Terra.com for Latinos, now ties up with Comcast.
More to come, Yahoo of this and Yahoo of that … watch this trend.
It is important.
And a similar trend is occurring in life event portals, such as theKnot.com for marriages, and BankRate.com for mortgages.
I wonder if portals will go through an evolution similar to larger economies. Generalists give way to specialization eventually themselves to be displaced. All of this in a repeating cycle with each new generation of productivity technology driving horizontal specialization displacing vertical integration monopolies. The monopolies having formed to increase efficiency with improved business structure.
So, this is a shift of generalists being displaced by specialization with improved productivity. In this case the productivity improvement is providing better targeting for advertising to market segments, and providing a more efficient market for tailored content.
I think it is interesting that each of the portals you have identified are still pretty much location independent. I wonder if similar specialization will come to the localized portals (example: Craigslist).
Hmmm. Thinking about this I believe there are opportunities for quite a bit more specialization to occur in portals before some new form of syndication drives reintegration.
Yes, very interesting trend.