Netscape's home page has always attracted a ton of traffic because it's the first page to which Netscape's browser takes every new user. What's new is that technology companies like Netscape and Microsoft are trying to transmute their home-page traffic into media businesses that rake in ad revenue. Since the Web industry moves in cycles, don't expect portal-mania to last forever. A portal is a portal is a portal. Overkill and overload.
Portal sites are commodities, and commodities are hard to sell at a premium.
Wall Street will eventually figure this out, and when it does, expect the portal stocks to take a long-deserved beating. Hello, I must be going. The typical users of a search engine or a stock-quote lookup find the infobit they're after and then vamoose. Even better for them, Netscape and Microsoft are both able to ship browsers pre-set to their own portal sites. You can make a fortune on such inertia, no question.