Portals need higher speeds & content to compete against BCE, says new report

An expected explosion in high-speed access will force Canadian portal companies to re-think their strategies, says the Yankee Group in Canada. In its recent report, All Aboard!: Last Call for Portal Partners, Yankee predicts BCE Inc will enjoy an edge over rivals CANOE.ca, Canada.com and the other Internet service providers thanks to its recent purchase of CTV Inc. (CNM, March 22/00) By combining bandwidth-intensive content available from the broadcaster with its own high-speed Internet service Sympatico, the report says Bell is head and shoulders above the competition, which are less likely to capture a share of those users spending greater amounts of time online. According to Yankee's Canadian Technologically Advanced Family Survey, 70 per cent of all users spend at least 30 minutes online per session. By combining speed and content, those users can be kept within a single portal longer, making it more valuable to advertisers. In its most recent analysis, the Yankee Group says that competitor Excite.ca, a partnership with Rogers Communications Inc, lacks the Canadian-specific content that would set it apart from other, more general portals in Canada. The report notes that two other major competitors, Canoe.ca and Canada.com, are notable because they don't have an access component, unlike either Rogers or Bell which each offer high-speed services. Without guarantees of bandwidth performance, Yankee believes each will lose eyeballs to the hybrid access/content service providers. "If a site can present the user with compelling content, then its success is virtually guaranteed-. However, the needs of the consumer will change as we go forward. The introduction of widespread high-speed access services will present portals with a significant challenge. If a portal is not able to provide content that is bandwidth-intensive, it will not be able to attract those high-speed providers. CANOE.ca and Canada.com must begin to investigate content partnerships that will fill this gap," concludes the report. The chart below indicates how much time online Canadians are spending daily on each session. "If a portal site is able to keep visitors on-site for the duration of their Internet session," says Yankee, "it becomes more valuable to advertisers- This is where the role of content becomes obvious - the more content a site has, the less likely a consumer is to click away in search of what they are looking for."

Portals need higher speeds & content to compete against BCE, says new report

News | 05/18/2000 4:00 am EDT

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