At the same time, the portals themselves must redesign their revenue models.
Portals remain enormously popular.
News and information sites are visited in 20 percent of user sessions, while shopping sites show up in 17 percent, and sports sites in only 5 percent. In addition, companies should consider sponsorships - attaching their names and messages to appropriate parts of a portal site, or creating altogether new sections. Despite this dramatic change, the study found, many portals still cling to an outdated revenue model that relies on advertising payments based in part on click-through rates. Banner ads accounted for half of all Internet advertising in the second quarter of 2000, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, although click-through rates for banner ads fell more than 40 percent between October 1999 and October 2000. For example, today only approximately 0.1 percent of portal visitors click on banner ads, yet Yahoo currently receives 90 percent of its revenue from ads.