Traffic on Netscape Communications' Internet directory Netcenter has increased 30 percent during the past two months, Netcenter's chief said on Tuesday.
Netcenter attracted more viewers through aggressive marketing and new services, said Mike Homer, manager of Netscape's (NSCP) Netcenter Web site.
"A lot of the new services led directly to new traffic," Homer said. "Webmail became a very popular service overnight. We get probably half our registrations from Webmail alone."
My Netscape, Smart Browsing, Netscape Search, and the rollout of its content channels also boosted traffic, he said.
One-year-old Netcenter is competing with Net directories Yahoo (YHOO) and Excite (XCIT) to become the first places Web surfers visit when they fire up their browsers. Netscape wants to bolster its software business with additional revenue from Netcenter's advertising.
Netscape has a distinct advantage over its rivals: its Communicator browser, which automatically turns to Netcenter on startup. Homer said 5 million copies of the browser will go out this month with Netcenter as the start page.
Separately, Homer said Netcenter doesn't need a big media company partnership to get the advertising to compete with portal rivals. Instead, Netcenter will make content deals for each of its content channels with small partners. Rivals like Infoseek (SEEK) and Snap have allied closely with the Walt Disney Co. (DIS) and General Electric's (GE) NBC network, respectively, to compete with leader Yahoo.
"We haven't found a single partner that had content that was really the best in every category," said Homer.
Companies like CBS have a great finance site but not the greatest news and hardly any programming for kids and family, said Homer.
Netcenter will announce several content partnerships for its news, sports, entertainment, kids and family, finance, and local channels, and roll them out within the next 45 days, Homer said.
Wired Digital, the parent company of Wired News, also owns the Hotbot search engine, which competes with Netcenter.
