The end of portals

With a digital media market that is becoming more sophisticated by the day; the portals are rapidly proving to be far too crude a tool to play a role of any significance in the rapidly emerging digital media market.

BuddeComm has never been an advocate of media portals, or their predecessors, the walled gardens. They are far too broad to be of any long-term benefit to users.

The Internet has shown that once users become familiar with a service they make their own choices, and often create their own personal portals. The Internet has shown that these broad media portals don’t, and won’t, work.

Those who are hanging on to portals (such as the mobile operators and some of the media companies on the Internet) are facing negative growth.

Of course vertical or specialised portals are working, and at present it is the news media portals that are gaining ground in the digital media market.

As to mobile, we have been arguing for a long time that the future of the operators might be more relevant to banking than to telecoms. They have a unique infrastructure in place that allows for micro payments – through Premium SMS – a key element that is still missing in the digital economy.

By opening up their networks to companies who wish to sell their services they could easily outstrip voice revenues. As BuddeComm has consistently predicted, this will happen over the next decade. Less greedy mobile operators are now starting to explore the opportunities here, sharing more revenues with the content and service providers.

While we are upbeat about mobile payments we are less certain about mobile marketing. There is very little room for marketing advertising. The mobile phone is a highly personal device and entering the private space of the users is a very hazardous undertaking.

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