Information Society indicators in the Member States of the EU
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2. Internet

2.3 Portals

The Portal industry in European Union is characterised by :

• The strong presence of American portals. 7 out of 11 of the main portals in the table below are American.

• A strong pre-emption of the telecom world: major EU portals have been set up by historic telecommunications operators (for example Wanadoo in France, T-Online in Germany, Terra Networks in Spain). These portals are the most successful in terms of audience. Still today, a few emanate from the "Internet/content" world (for example Freeserve and Worldonline).

• Few European portals have set up subsidiaries abroad. Among the European portals that are present outside their national market for example we can notice T-Online which is present in 4 European countries besides Germany under the names of local portal the they merged with.

• As a consequence, no European leaders have yet emerge in the European market. On the contrary, a lot of American portals are transnational, conceiving the sector in a global way.

• European portals such as Wanadoo or T-Online, are usually the leader in their national market in term of audience, while US portals such as Yahoo tend not to be the leader in all the countries where they are present but are usually in the top 10 in a lot of countries.

• Nevertheless, concentration and mergers are on the way. T-Online (Club Internet, Terravista, Yacom), Terra Networks (merged with Lycos) and Tiscali (merged with Worldonline) have already started the process off.

Source: SEMA Group

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All data have been collected from readily available public sources of information (annual reports and publications by regulatory bodies, professional associations, operators, etc.). This is not a scientific document, but rather seeks to identify the key trends. To this end, where necessary, estimations have been made.

Additional data and information sources are available in the country reports that can be found on the ESIS Knowledge Base (http://www.ispo.cec.be/esis).

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