• by Ross Fadner , June 17, 2008

It's hard to say that portals are dead when one-third of online spending goes to these Web advertising behemoths, media buyer Jason Steinberg told advertisers and publishers attending the OMMA Publish conference in New York. Steinberg pointed out that when you add Google to the mix, you're actually talking about two-thirds of all online ad dollars. “I think portals have been and will continue to be central to our mix,” he said, adding that there's no more reliable, flexible way to buy ads on the Web.

Even rival publishers love portals, apparently. As Gordon McLeod, President of The Wall Street Journal's Digital Network, said, “We love portals…I hope you're not dead.” Surprising perhaps to hear that from a publisher competing with the likes of Yahoo and AOL for eyeballs, but McLeod pointed to Web portals' unparalleled ability to aggregate audiences and drive traffic to other publishers' sites. “I don't think (portals are) dead at all because media is still very hard to buy in this space,” McLeod added.