Do Web Portals Have A Future?

Something big happened in the Digital Marketing landscape last week.

In case you missed it, on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010, Compete announced that Facebook surged passed Yahoo! as the number two most popular website in the U.S. That’s big news, and most people focused on the numbers (nearly 134 Million Unique Visitors in January 2010, amazing engagement and thoughts about whether or not Facebook can eventually trump Google’s position at #1), which is an important part.

But there’s something bigger happening here.

It’s easy to call this the death of the portal (and it might be), but that comment would be somewhat displaced if you looked at the numbers and how the rest of the Compete list plays out. What is happening is that as more and more people who are connecting online - and are building their profiles in spaces like online social networks - are much more inclined to make those personal pages their homepage.

Another interesting take on Social vs. Search from Mitch Joel at Twist Image. Click the link above to read the entire article, it is really interesting food for thought…