Downtown Manhattan or Tokyo has quantifiable real estate rented or sold by space and everyone from Godzilla to Donald Trump knows the intrinsic value of that earth.
On the Web, anyone can have real estate space, but all space is not created equal, as shown by the handful of deals and the promise of more handshakes to follow that pushed the value of the top 10 Web sites up 13.8% the past week.
By now you may have heard of the cry “location, location, location,” but a more appropriate phrase may be “habit, habit, habit” as people get into routines, repeat Web travel routes, glean and go. For anyone on the Web that means “what’s new” or “where do you want to go today” may not be as important as “here’s the stuff you always want to know.”
But before bright-eyed entrepreneurs resign themselves to thinking Yahoo! won, or that AOL.com rules, consider that the Web isn’t etched in stone and nobody “owns” customers or users despite what the marketers want you to believe. On the Web, “downtown Manhattan” can relocate to whatever site suits the user’s current needs.
The Web is more like Hollywood, each site must continually provide the hits to get the hits or else people will go elsewhere.
On the Web, today’s Tokyo can be tomorrow’s Podunk. It happened to CompuServe, Prodigy, Delphi, and eWorld (now there’s a lost city for sure).
The Mega Sites
Mecklermedia’s | Unique | June 17 | June 24 | Percent | June 17 | June 24 |
WebSite | Users | Market cap or PMV* | Market cap or PMV* | change | User | User |
Value Index | (millions) | (millions) | (millions) | Value | Value | |
Yahoo | 31.4 | $6,046 | $6,885 | 13.9% | $193 | $220 |
AOL.com* | 22.9 | $2,200 | $2,500 | 13.6% | $96 | $109 |
Excite | 19.4 | $1,784 | $1,993 | 11.7% | $92 | $103 |
Netscape.com* | 18.9 | $1,500 | $1,600 | 6.7% | $79 | $85 |
Microsoft.com* | 17.4 | $1,800 | $2,000 | 11.1% | $103 | $115 |
MSN.com/Hotmail | 14.8 | $1,000 | $1,250 | 25.0% | $68 | $85 |
GeoCities* | 14.0 | $450 | $500 | 11.1% | $32 | $36 |
Lycos | 13.7 | $1,103 | $1,253 | 13.6% | $81 | $91 |
Infoseek | 13.3 | $1,080 | $1,049 | -2.9% | $82 | $79 |
Disney.com* | 8.5 | $750 | $1,000 | 33.3% | $89 | $118 |
TOTAL | 174.1 | $17,713 | $20,030 | 13.1% | $914 | $1,040 |
AVERAGE | 17.4 | $1,771 | $2,003 | 13.1% | $91 | $104 |
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