Then starting Wednesday, you also can have a Web page. In addition, home-page companies can demand a cut of sales generated from the sites. In fact, all the leading portals boast home-page sites.
Portals use the free home pages to get people to go to their sites and stick there.
But some analysts say the home-page market is saturated, and they are skeptical about whether a company offering home pages without other services can make any money. He notes that other sites tend to have long and complicated Internet addresses that are hard to remember. Despite virtually no press, Gross says more than 100,000 have signed up for pages linked to their names. And with the new ability to immediately get a page simply by calling a number, Gross is convinced he has a winner. Anyone with a phone number can punch in an address with his or her phone number and immediately be given a page.