As the portal wars escalate, search engine OEM Inktomi Corp has looked offshore for new clients and joint venture partners, while Yahoo! Inc has made Ticketmaster Multimedia Holdings Inc a merchant and content provider to its site. The Ticketmaster deal will see Yahoo promoted through direct mail to Ticketmaster customers, while Yahoo users will be able to buy tickets to sporting events, concerts and the theater through the Yahoo site. Yahoo won’t, however, disclose the dollar value of the deal or even who pays who. Ticketmaster was not available for comment. Inktomi’s more concrete deals involve licensing its Traffic Server network caching software to Scandanavian telco Telenor and Itochu Techno-Science Corporation (CTC) in Japan. Inktomi won’t disclose any figures either. What it will say is that solutions provider CTC is a distribution partner and won’t actually be using Traffic Server itself, but Telenor is a customer and the two companies are now negotiating the terms of that sale. The frenzied activity in the directory and search engine market reflects the extremely competitive nature of web advertising at present. Research firm Forrester estimates that these portal sites now claim 15% of traffic but 59% of web advertising. That disproportion is unlikely to sustain itself. By 2002 today’s nine contenders – AOL, AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Microsoft, Netscape, Snap and Yahoo – are expected to have shaken down to three. Place your bets.
