Yet users pay nothing for the value they enjoy, and marketers pay little for the large audiences and deep insights the portals amass. The obvious mismatch between value creation and value capture mechanisms can be fixed if consumer marketers start treating portals as brand development venues. That is, marketers should pay a portal for the total number of impressions of a marketer's message it delivers to visitors at a portal site. Likewise portals should shift away from per-click pricing and align their pricing models to the ways in which they actually capture the audience. For example, portals could become more valuable to marketers by using jazzier graphics and audio and video, applying advertising creativity to help a marketer's message stand out by going beyond all the look-alike banner ads.
Sponsorships are another tactic that can be used to create and capture branding value.
Portals also must develop ways to encourage consumers who are used to free services to pay for content. Marketers also need to understand why users treat specific portals as destinations. Build a strategy around the parts of the portal where the target audiences are more amenable to new information or a creative pitch. Push yourself, your advertising agencies, and the portals to deploy a full arsenal of infotainment weapons to create attention-grabbing ads and substantive content. Once marketers look beyond the banners, there's a smorgasbord of portal possibilities.