First Women, Then Latinos

Segmented Community Portals are becoming more and more important.

Today’s Mercury News reports: Comcast targets Latinos with Yahoo-like site .

iVillage is a community portal for Women. NBC buys.

MySpace is a community portal for Teens. Murdoch buys.

Terra.com for Latinos, now ties up with Comcast.

More to come, Yahoo of this and Yahoo of that … watch this trend.

It is important.

Comments

And a similar trend is occurring in life event portals, such as theKnot.com for marriages, and BankRate.com for mortgages.

I wonder if portals will go through an evolution similar to larger economies. Generalists give way to specialization eventually themselves to be displaced. All of this in a repeating cycle with each new generation of productivity technology driving horizontal specialization displacing vertical integration monopolies. The monopolies having formed to increase efficiency with improved business structure.

So, this is a shift of generalists being displaced by specialization with improved productivity. In this case the productivity improvement is providing better targeting for advertising to market segments, and providing a more efficient market for tailored content.

I think it is interesting that each of the portals you have identified are still pretty much location independent. I wonder if similar specialization will come to the localized portals (example: Craigslist).

Hmmm. Thinking about this I believe there are opportunities for quite a bit more specialization to occur in portals before some new form of syndication drives reintegration.

Yes, very interesting trend.

Sophos Wednesday, March 8, 2006 at 10:44 PM PT