Page 156 - Electronic Commerce

Selling on the Web

One of the leading Web portal sites is Yahoo!, which was one of the first Web
directories. A Web directory is a listing of hyperlinks to Web pages. Because the Yahoo!
portal’s search engine presents visitors’ search results on separate pages, it can include
advertising on each results page that is triggered by the terms in the search. For example,
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when the Yahoo! search engine detects that a visitor has searched on the term new car
deals, it can place a Ford ad at the top of the search results page. Ford is willing to pay
more for this ad because it is directed only at visitors who have expressed interest in new
cars. Besides Yahoo!, portal sites that use the general interest strategy today include
Google and Bing. Smaller general interest sites, such as the Web directory refdesk.com,
have had more difficulty attracting advertisers than the larger sites.
Not all portals use a general interest strategy, however. Some portals are designed to
help visitors find information within a specific knowledge domain. The technology portal
C-NET is one example of this type of site. C-NET uses the collection of specific interest
strategy. The entire site is devoted to technology products and the site includes many
reviews of specific technologies and related products. Advertisers pay more to have their
ad appear near a discussion of a technology related to their product or on a page that
reviews the product.
Travel portals such as Kayak have also been successful as advertising-supported online
businesses. The Kayak site allows visitors to specify travel dates and destinations, and
then searches multiple sites to find the best airfares, car rentals, and hotel rooms. It
searches provider sites such as those of the airlines, hotels, and car rental companies, but
it also searches sites that consolidate travel products and sell them at reduced prices.
Kayak benefits its visitors by saving them the trouble of visiting multiple sites to find the
best travel deals. And it sells targeted advertising space to companies that want to reach
travelers with near-term travel plans.

Advertising-Supported Newspapers
Many newspapers and magazines publish all or part of their print content on the Web.
They sell advertising to cover the costs of converting their print content to an online
format and operating the Web site. Some publications, such as local shopping news and
alternative press newspapers, have always been fully supported by advertising revenues
and are distributed at retail locations and newsstands without charge. Many of these
publications have made an easy transition to an advertising-supported revenue model. A
number of small-town weekly newspapers have always used a pure advertising-supported
revenue model, and many that have not are now moving in that direction. Most
newspapers and magazines, however, have relied on subscription and newsstand revenue
to supplement their advertising revenue. These publications have had a more difficult
time in making their online editions generate sufficient advertising revenue to support
their full operations.
Although a Web site can provide greater exposure for a newspaper’s name and a
larger audience for advertising that it carries, an online edition also can divert sales from
the print edition. Like retailers or distributors whose online sales lead to the loss of their
brick-and-mortar sales, publishers also experience sales losses as a result of online

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