Mar 06
People Leaving Portals for Niche Sites, Ad Dollars Follow
Good news for small and medium sized publishers. Web users are moving away from the portals and spending more time on niche sites. Accordingly, advertisers are spending more money on these sites, which offer superior audience targeting.
This makes a lot of sense. The portals are generic. They’re good for general mainstream news (sports, finance, etc.) but not much else. When you want content about the stuff that means a lot to you (but not a billion other people) you go somewhere more specific.
As the average internet user becomes more savvy, they’ll feel increasingly comfortable on smaller sites and be more willing to branch out. More people will understand that Yahoo/Google/MSN is not the internet. Social media sites like Digg make discovering niche sites increasingly easy.
The advantage the portals have always had is scale. How does your company reach a massive audience? But as the online ad industry matures and inventory from niche sites is consolidated, ad buyers will have more (and better) options.
This is vital to what we’re building at PeopleJam.
March 10th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Great post, John. We’re seeing much of what you’re talking about on CVaSports.com. Most of our advertisers are doing business with us because we offer a hyper local, highly targeted audience. They’re seeing return on their investment because of our niche. Great blog. I’ll be reading!
March 10th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Glad you made it by. I agree that you guys are in great position as web ads start to go local. I’ll be looking forward to your future comments!
March 31st, 2008 at 11:09 am
[…] big shot at Viacom is echoing the sentiment of my earlier post about portals losing traffic and ad dollars to niche sites: The Web is fragmenting in a big way. People are using search to find […]