Everyman of the internet looks to niche audiences

This week Yahoo!7 unveiled details of two more "vertical channels" to appeal to niche audiences.

Billed as a one-stop shop for travel, the relaunched Totaltravel

.com.au allows people to browse Australian holiday destinations either by looking at videos or reading articles, book accommodation and flights directly and then rate and post reviews of their holidays.

The company is also putting the finishing touches to a leisure site for young men that funnels content from 30 specialist sport and adventure websites including Billabong, Swellnet, Powderhound and Prime Triathlon Australia, Scubapix and Underwater Australasia - in effect bringing the niches back inside its ecosystem.

Its purchase of Total Travel last year gave Yahoo!7 access to a database of 8000 advertisers that list accommodation on the site and the 1.2 million who regularly visited it.

It marks a change in direction for Yahoo!7, which has already partnered with established brands such as Seek for jobs, Match for dating, Realestate.com.au for property and Carsales for cars - whatever it takes to keep those audiences from going elsewhere.

Traffic to the two main portals, Yahoo!7 and Ninemsn - the latter a joint venture between PBL Media and Microsoft - is flat, while the number of people on the internet in Australia has risen by more than 5.5 per cent to 14.3 million people in the past nine months, according to Nielsen.

Yahoo!7's chief executive, Rohan Lund, says: "We are either ... buying the traffic from Google or we are building experiences that people will want to visit. We believe there's still a place for people to come to first but we need to give them experiences that are deep and relevant."

Even Google seems to have come to the realisation that the internet is not getting any smaller and that the days when a one-word search throws up a relevant query are nearing an end. Last week it signed a deal to purchase ITA Software, a company that organises fares, flight and journey times used by airlines and travel agents.

Google is well aware of the need to "make it easier for users to search for specialised information and to deliver more useful results to them", says a spokeswoman, who adds that the travel software purchase will lead to more "relevant" search results. When you search for hotels on Google Maps, for example in the US, you'll be able to enter the dates you plan to stay and see real prices on selected listings, joining real estate listings.

In Australia Google is rolling out ad units that add more information to sponsored results such the location of the nearest store, its latest offers and directions of how to get there. Ninemsn launched a dedicated entertainment site - with a very different look and feel from the mothership - called The Fix, which has been successful in bringing a new and different audience that it can sell to advertisers. More vertical channels are planned.

They might be different businesses but Google, Ninemsn, Yahoo!7 and other established websites are all struggling with the same problem: how to ensure they remain relevant when there is so much choice out there. At last count there were about 206,956,723 websites ... and counting.