It was bound to happen. Someone would introduce an Internet portal where people could check their e-mail, read news, look up stock quotes and such without the bustle of big moving, flashing advertisements that make using a site like Yahoo like walking through Times Square.
Such a site was indeed introduced last week: MyWay.com, a zen rock garden of a portal with lots of features quietly presented and no discernable advertising. And no fee.
The site's revenue comes from text advertising links listed above its Web search results. The search results and the ads are provided by Google.
Most improbable about MyWay is its creator, Bulldog Holdings, the owner of Iwon.com, considered by some to be perhaps the most garish and crass of all the portals. Iwon's premise is that users earn entries into a sweepstakes with every click. It was among the earliest users of large banner advertisements and those that drive animated minivans and such in front of whatever users want to read.
Bulldog, an Irvington, New York, company that also calls itself Excite Networks, has been profitable for a year and has managed better than most to ride the shifting tides of the Internet. Iwon.com was built in secret with backing from CBS and introduced in 1999 with a US$70 million ad campaign. Its slogan captured the attitude of a generation of business school graduates about starting an Internet company: "Why wouldn't you?"
Excite deal
By the end of last year, the founders of Iwon, Jonas Steinman and Bill Daugherty, had stayed solvent enough to buy the once highflying Excite portal out of bankruptcy court for US$10 million.
Over the summer, they began to look around for yet another site to start.
"We were bantering back and forth for weeks about what the next big thing would be," said Daugherty. "Jonas said, `Why not an ad-free portal?'"
With their existing technology and relations with content providers, they figured they could run another portal with very little incremental cost. Meanwhile, the market has been booming for "sponsored results" -- the emerging term for text advertisements placed amid search results. Both Google and Overture Services sell such advertising and place it on search sites, passing most of the fees back to the sites.
As a result, Daugherty said, the MyWay site will be profitable in the first month.
Steinman said that the best candidates for MyWay were users of Yahoo who have become dissatisfied.
"They have 40 different advertising placements on their home page," he said. "And they changed their privacy policy six months ago to use their list for all sorts of marketing."
MyWay's privacy policy promises not to collect personal information or send users e-mail.
Analysts said it would be a long time before Yahoo had to worry.
"It's a neat idea that will have some appeal to consumers who are tired of pop-ups and are still in a dial-up world so they want a site that is fast," said Gordon Hodge, an analyst with Thomas Wiesel Partners who has seen the site. "The question is how can they get the word out about it."
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