The Growth of Industry Web Portals: Framework and Guidelines

Literature Review

Damsgaad (2002) presents a portal life cycle model for web portal management. The life cycle model contains four phases: attraction phase, contagion phase, entrenchment phase, and defense phase, in which practitioners at each phase face the necessity to overcome certain challenges to advance to the next phase. The attraction phase of a web portal begins from the launching of the web portal with some unique/innovative features that existing web portals do not provide. The primary objectives of practitioners in the attraction stage of the process involve on attracting visitors and keeping them coming back to the portal, with eventually visitors becoming recurring users. Practitioners in the contagion phase seek to “infect” the recurring users so that they can help spread the portal. Practitioners find themselves in the entrenchment phase comes when the number of users of the portal reaches a “critical mass”. The web portal at this phase can then “tax” users by providing upgraded/enhanced services and accepting advertisements. Once the portal is well established, practitioners then must defend the successful position they have achieved by carefully monitoring the challenges from new entrants. The primary goal of these practitioners in each of these four phases is to “lock-in” users, so that they do not switch to competitors (Damsgaad, 2002).