Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
The Washington
Post
May 19, 2000, Friday, Final Edition
SECTION: FAST FORWARD; Pg. E01; LOGGING ON
LENGTH: 941 words
HEADLINE:
Top Web Sites Win At the Name-Recognition Game
BYLINE:
Rob Pegoraro
BODY:
Look at a top-10 list of
Web sites these days--like the rankings we published in Wednesday's "Wired Life"
section--and you may start to feel jaded about the Web's alleged diversity. At
the top of the Internet food chain, this diversity often seems to come in only
three flavors: AOL, Yahoo and MSN.
This dominance holds true not just in
the portal/search category you might expect, but in areas as diverse as personal
ads (love.aol.com topped Nielsen NetRatings' list in March) and personal finance
(finance.yahoo.com led that one). And it jumps across national boundaries: The
research firm Media Metrix reports that Yahoo and MSN were the two most popular
sites in the United Kingdom in March. Yahoo and MSN ranked second and fourth in
France and Australia for that month. "These top sites, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft,
have also built global brands," said spokeswoman Stacie Leone. "Yahoo.com in
France is considered a French company."
Why is this? A few
possibilities:
1. It's a confusing Web out there; if one site can give
you what you need, why go elsewhere?
2. It's a confusing Web out there;
why not stick with the site you trust?
3. We have all been brainwashed
by dot-com advertising, and this "leveraging of brand equity" won't stop until
we're buying Yahoo! (TM) bread at the grocery store.
But there's also a
fourth explanation: Think about how the Web might look to somebody just getting
online. Sure, there are untold millions of Web sites out there. But if you've
yet to log on before, how many will you know about? Among the newly wired crowd,
only a lucky few sites can boast the kind of brand names that define entire
categories; think of these places as the Coke, Xerox and Kleenex of the
Internet.
Look at Hotmail. The first Web site to offer free e-mail
accounts, it now claims almost 60 million members and is at the state of
ubiquity where people use "Hotmail" as a synonym for any Web-based e-mail
account ("Do you have a Hotmail account?" "Yeah, I've got one set up with
Yahoo.").
"They're certainly many, many other online auctions sites,
[but] I think eBay has become another generic term," said Gwen Schertel, who
teaches a course for Internet beginners at the About.com site. She also cited
Yahoo and Amazon as similar cases.
The CEOs of these companies must be
rubbing their hands with delight when they think about the public image their
sites have built. Especially the people behind the leading portals. Once you've
got an account set up with one, why would you want to leave, when everything
from an online address book to bill-payment services to online shopping is just
clicks away.
Against this kind of market momentum, competing sites face
a tough battle to stay relevant. But here's where the Web stops acting like the
market for soda or photocopiers or bathroom tissue.
In much of the
off-line world, there's limited room--shelf space, street addresses or slices of
the electromagnetic spectrum--for competition. Consider one particularly
troubling example in the news, FM radio: After spending the past decade merging
into a handful of huge chains, the broadcasters are now trying to squelch
community-based, low-power FM stations--without waiting to see
whether these new competitors actually interfere with existing transmitters. So
not only can you not get a decent choice of stations, the industry wants
Congress to outlaw any expansion of that limited selection, even on an
experimental basis.
I can't begin to describe how happy I am that the
Web doesn't work like that--that this isn't a place that can be fenced off and
carved up by a Big Three or Big Four. Yes, the rules of capitalism still apply
online, and the wacky, creative places won't always stick around. But as
almighty as the brand equity of Amazon, AOL, eBay, MSN or Yahoo may be, there's
always going to be room online for the next bizarre business model or offbeat
work of art, whether it's dancing hamsters or a new way to share music.
Which--to be a complete bleeding-heart for the Internet's potential--will give
us the next crop of ubiquitous brand names.
To follow up
on last week's column on the "I Love You" virus: On Monday, Microsoft announced
plans to offer a downloadable update for its Outlook 98 and Outlook 2000 e-mail
programs (http://officeupdate.microsoft.com). The as-yet-unreleased fix will
prevent users from opening, saving or running any of 37 different file
types--executable programs, scripts, batch files or links to the same.
The update will also reset Outlook's security settings to "Restricted"
and will ask the user to approve or deny other programs' attempts to access
Outlook's address book. As numerous Palm and Windows CE user sites noted, the
last change will cause problems for anybody trying to synchronize a Palm or
WinCE handheld with Outlook; each sync will be interrupted by a security-alert
dialogue box.
Microsoft's update is a fairly drastic remedy, but at
least the company has realized that the Internet can't be treated like a very
large office network, where your friendly systems administrator works tirelessly
to make sure that no viruses show up at the front door. The bigger problem with
this update, however, isn't what it does and doesn't include; it's how few
people will bother to download and install it in the first place.
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at
rob@twp.com.
Looking for something on the Web and not finding it
at Yahoo or its ilk? Watch Rob Pegoraro play "human search engine" at 1 p.m.
today. To send in your Web-site queries, visit
www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
GRAPHIC:
ILL,,STEVE MCCRACKEN FOR TWP
LOAD-DATE: May 19, 2000
