The D.I.Y. Portal

With Google's (NASD: GOOG) foray into email (last year) and now chat, slowly and slowly each major internet company comes to resemble the others more and more.  And Google's not alone in its horizontal expansion.  Amazon (NASD: AMZN) and Interactive Corp (NASD: IACI) have gotten into search.  Yahoo (NASD: YHOO) is expanding its commerce operations, as well building its own distributed advertising network.  There's a lot of market cap in these behemoths, and a lot of unnecessary redundancy.  All of it, of course, provided free of charge.  But this is an old story, and one that people are hopefully taking into account when they pay up for these companies stocks.  On the plus side of course, these sites, and let's call them what they are "portals" (yes, even google), supposedly are great platforms for selling ads and building brands.

But I think an even more dangerous (than overlapping and redundancy) threat looms on the horizon.  Technology is going to make it really easy or any company to built a portal.

Let's suppose we decided to make The Stalwart a finance portal.  How hard would that be?  We could easily add  a stock-quote bar to the side that would query Yahoo for a number, and Google News (or Technorati or PubSub) for company-related headlines (RSS makes that just too simple).  With no technical expertise, we could start giving away @Thestalwart.com email addresses using Squirrelmail, and setting up a message board would be a snap with PHPbb.  If someone wanted company specific information, we'd set up auto-links to WikiPedia where they'll find much better company profiles than they'll see on Yahoo Finance.  Yahoo of course can't do this, because once they start linking people to pages off Yahoo, they cease to be a good place for brand building.  And the best part of all, we're gonna use other company's servers and bandwidth to bring our users to the best information on the web. 

And how are we gonna make money off this?  Well we can set up Adsense, or Yahoo's program, or AskJeeves', or Blogads', or Kanoodle's, or really anyone who gives us the best deal. We're not gonna have high costs, so profits should be easy to come by. Eventually there'll be  an open-source ad network with very little money going to a middle-man.

So while the big Net companies continue to morph into one and another, they are building something quite huge, quite vulnerable, and possibly, quite valueless.  As for The Stalwart's future plans...stay tuned.

Comments

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Yahoo of course can't do this, because once they start linking people to pages off Yahoo, they cease to be a good place for brand building.

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