[Sydney, AUSTRALIA] Melbourne-based free ISP GoConnect has launched a portal
complete with e-commerce partners as part of a drive to expand its online
business model.
Through the new portal, GoConnect will seek to push into four e-commerce
areas, with finance, shopping, leisure and community services sections of
the site.
GoConnect will use new partner LookSmart as a site content provider, with
the ISP’s now 56,000 members able to access the edited and reviewed sites
that LookSmart develops. This kind of content provision and licensing will
form a key part of LookSmart’s revenue model in the future, as new chief
executive officer said last month when he arrived in the position.
GoConnect managing director David Tam said that the deal with LookSmart
will provide more portal functionality for the ISP’s existing users, and he
hoped it would help drive traffic to the portal and “generate revenue for
both LookSmart and GoConnect immediately, and strengthen our online
advertising delivery model.” “We can expect to achieve greater advertising
impressions, which in turn takes advantage of the true potential of GoTrek
as an online advertising medium,” said Tam.
“This agreement enhances our member offerings and increases the length of
time they are likely to spend at the GoConnect portal. Already on average
members spend 22 minutes on the site.”
GoTrek, which is GoConnect’s proprietary advertising technology, delivers
video and sound advertisements to a pop-up window that remains active while
the GoConnect member is online and using the ISP service. This is
essentially the exchange the user must offer for GoConnect’s free Internet
access.
The content LookSmart will provide will initially be supported by the
e-commerce and community service categories, for which e-tailers,
Wishlist,
dstore,
Sanity Music, employment service
Seek and Chinese portal
nihao2000 will join as strategic
partners. Tam said that GoConnect was also currently in discussions with
other potential partners.
“There will be about 15 subsections in each of the portal’s four main
categories, and three or four partners behind each of those,” said Tam.
“We’re planning then to have between 150 and 200 partners, and we’re aiming
to have half of them by the end of the year and the other half in the six
months after that.”
While the community services and the shopping categories are already
operational, Tam expected it would be around six to eight weeks before the
finance and leisure sections went live. In the interim, GoConnect will
continue pursuing partners to support these categories.
GoConnect’s expanding business model will draw revenue from three main
areas: a commission from every transaction conducted through its portal, the
advertising revenue derived from GoTrek and site advertising, and the fees
it will draw from the licensing deals for GoTrek’s technology. “We are
currently discussing licensing with several ISPs overseas, and we’re not
averse to licensing it locally.”
Although GoConnect has 56,000 members using the service, Tam said that
there are a further 400,000 people who have registered an interest in the
ISP, but are still waiting for access. This was a situation that caused the
Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission (ACCC) to ask GoConnect to stop its online and offline
marketing campaign to attract members, as people who had already signed on
were waiting to gain access to the ISP.
“We’re not getting sufficient capacity from Telstra, and that has forced
us to push back our plans for reaching 500,
000 in the first year,” said Tam.
“People are still interested, however as our infrastructure provider,
PowerTel, uses the Telstra exchanges. We are slowly getting a response from
Telstra to change this.”
