Net winners and losers emerge

The worldwide consolidation of Internet players has resulted in a few global leaders, and many casualties. But some really strong Internet companies are now beginning to emerge.

Yahoo! remains the best known and most successful Internet portal, around the world and also in the Middle East. Google.com is likewise the world's favorite search engine, and up for an IPO this year. EBay is triumphant as a profitable electronic marketplace for just about everything, and against the odds, Amazon.com has made it as a global Internet bookstore.

These are probably the websites most users in the Middle East know well. Here the regional portals, such as Arabia Online and MSN Arabia, are still struggling to make an impact and weary of revealing their viewer statistics.

Their owners continue to pour money into their development in the hope that the Middle East will come to love its portals, and Arabia Online announced another 'successful' round of funding last week. But all over the world, Internet users are abandoning portals and going direct to their favorite destination sites, leaving the portals without a role.

For example, English Expatriates love the Electronic Telegraph, CNN also has CNN Arabic, and most of the Middle East's leading newspapers have online editions. Regional TV stations such as Al Jazeera also have popular websites. Why do you need to visit a portal when you already know where to find what you want to read?

Specialist news is another case in point. AME Info is the leading regional website for business and financial news, with 15 million page views and one million plus users a month. ITP.net is the unassailable leader as a specialist news provider in the IT sector.

It surely seems likely such destination websites, which provide unique content, will ultimately prove more successful in the Middle East than the portals which people simply do not use that often once they find what interests them on the Net.

Somebody once asked: who will become the Yahoo! of the Middle East? The thinking was that MSN Arabia or Arabia Online would fill this space. But they perhaps overlooked the fact that Yahoo! is already the Yahoo! of the Middle East, and by far the region's favorite portal. The others do not come close.

So unless Internet user habits change, the regional Net champions will probably be the destination websites that provide the information that local people need rather than the regional portals whose names well may be new to some readers of this article.

The other Middle East Internet winners will be sites that provide specialist services, such as Arabic translation, media monitoring or local e-commerce. But in all cases these will be comparatively modest businesses, although they will grow strongly as the Internet itself spreads across the region.