Proprietary Content, Applications, and Unmetered Access Drive Consumer Behavior

Topical Report Volume 2, 2001 This report examines the growth, market share, and interplay of the top 10 ISPs and portals in the UK market, which collectively accounted for a substantial 22 percent of usage time in October 2000. As the number of online users and the amount of time they spend online continue to grow, UK ISPs are aggressively adopting a content strategy, to compete with portals. The ISP business in the UK at the moment is not profitable; only telcos are making money. Freeserve.com, at great expense, has been subsidizing free access during the sec-ond half of 2000. Relying on traffic because of a lock on users' default browser start page, ISPs are now striv-ing to become mainstream portal plays, bolstering subscription revenues with advertising and commerce dol-lars earned via an increasingly captive audience.