Salkowski

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Fire up your PCs and hold onto your wallets: The Great Internet Bribe-a-thon is kicking into high gear.

It’s a race like no other, where the competitors are overcapitalized corporations and the first one to the finish line actually loses. The winners? They’ll be the sites that manage to stay in the race long enough to collect a trophy.

Surely you’re aware that a dozen or so jumbo-sized Web sites are competing to be your home away from home on the Net. These so-called portals Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and their ilk try to induce you to stick around and look at some ads by offering free e-mail, free news, free chat and the freedom to customize your free start-up screen right down to the font they use to deliver free stock quotes.

Despite their generosity, portals haven’t managed to capture enough of the online market to make any money certainly not the kind of money their bloated stock market valuations suggest they should be raking in.

Some people might interpret this as proof that portals don’t work, since Web surfers have no reason to spend all their time at one site. But those people would be making entirely too much sense to survive in the Internet business. Instead, portal pushers figure they just need a better inducement to keep Net users from leaving their sites.

Alta Vista, a portal built around a popular search engine, is preparing to offer the Net’s next great come on: free Internet access. Anyone who agrees to spend a little time with the site and its advertisers will be able to surf for free, saving $20 a month for, oh, maybe some online shopping.

The company’s approach is fraught with potential problems. But if Alta Vista manages to pull this off in a way that doesn’t annoy customers or tap out its corporate credit cards, it might have found a gimmick that can someday make portals profitable.

Alta Vista hasn’t announced the service yet, but it should be available nationwide in the next few weeks, said company spokesman David Emanuel.

To get free access, Net users will have to use Alta Vista as their browser’s start page and keep a so-called MicroPortal open on their desktop whenever they’re online.

The MicroPortal is a small window displaying an AltaVista search form, links to Alta Vista services, and rotating ads from the site’s sponsors. It will float on top of whatever other windows might be open on your screen, sort of like the second image on a picture-in-picture TV. Users won’t be able to close it, but they may be able to move it around if it gets in the way of their regular Web browsing, Emanuel said.

Will this work? Or will users end up swinging at their monitors with fly-swatters, trying to smack that little box into oblivion? It’s hard to say without actually seeing the MicroPortal in action. I imagine it’ll be like trying to surf the Web with Mini Me, the diminutive villain from the latest Austin Powers movie, standing in front of your screen jabbering about Starbucks or Heineken.

Alta Vista could design its pages to leave room for MicroPortal, giving its users another reason to stick around. It also could customize content to be viewed within the relatively small MicroPortal, such as breaking news stories or a life-size representation of Al Gore’s presidential hopes.

The company’s freeloading customers will have to turn over their demographic data and allow the site to track their surfing habits. The company won’t share individual files with marketers, Emanuel said. But it will use the data for target marketing, such as sending ads for sports utility vehicles to people who show an interest in spending absurd amounts of money on equipment they really don’t need.

While many Net users won’t like Alta Vista’s terms, I figure plenty of people will give the deal a try. And when they do, you can bet other players in the portal race will scramble to make similar offers. Don’t be surprised if by the end of the year, a half-dozen portals are trying to get you to surf for free through their sites.

The business model makes a certain amount of sense. America Online and other Internet service providers have always fared better than portals at holding their customers’ attention. Free Net access could compel surfers who split time between several portals to choose sides, winnowing out weaker players and leaving higher hit counts for sites that don’t drop from the sheer expense of maintaining a nationwide network.

Alta Vista’s gambit certainly won’t end the portal race. But if it catches on, it’ll at least make sure a respectable number of Net surfers show up to watch.

To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him at [email protected] or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.

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