New Comscore data shows the extent to which Facebook and Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) have become internet destinations while portals Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) MSN lose ground. The social network and e-commerce sites have become home to many internet visitors as online transactions, both commercial and human, take market share from old-line portals. It is another example of how the portal business has lost ground as it has aged.

In November, Facebook had 166 million unique visitors, compared to Yahoo!’s 174.4 million and Microsoft’s 175.5 million. The shift is extraordinary because Yahoo! and Microsoft each have such a plethora of content and features. These range from mail to gossip and entertainment sections to sports and jobs. Facebook’s role is to be a simple community. Yet, that community has become a recommendation ground for internet navigation. Why go to Yahoo! to look for content when Facebook friends will show the most important and presumably relevant parts of the internet for you? Facebook has grown so important that portals use the social network’s features to direct traffic to their content.

The rise of Amazon is even more impressive. It had 112.9 million unique visitors in November. The world’s largest e-commerce site is no longer just a place to buy things. It has become an idea generation destination with “conversations” about books and tens of thousands of other products and services. Amazon has added to that its own “portals” of sorts with the Kindle e-reader and tablet, as well as Amazon’s streaming video service. Together these offer a filter for what each visitor thinks is most important about the web.

The power balance between destinations that show visitors what to do and those that allow recommendations of things to do has tipped in favor of the users’ interests. Portal destinations determine what is important, but each is essentially a collection of what its content editors thinks the visitor should see.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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