Types of Web Portals

(1) Vertical Portals:
A vertical market is one where vendors offer goods or services to an industry with specialised needs. Health care and real estate are two prime examples of vertical markets.
Vertical portals, such as Baby Centre UK, connect users to content from different websites all related to the same vertical market. These portals, also known as “vortals”, narrowly focus content to attract and appeal to their niche. The portals offer a wealth of in-depth content, shopping, advertising and community building. They also amass large mailing lists of eligible customers for their vertical and may offer subscriptions to exclusive content.


A vertical portal (also known as a "portal") is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest. They provide access to a variety of information and services about a particular area of interest.
These are web portals which focus only on one specific industry, domain or vertical. Vertical portals provide tools, information, articles, research and statistics on the specific industry or vertical. As the web has become a standard tool for business.
Example: “http://www.wine.com” is a vertical portal. Such portals offer information and services customized for the niche audience. Some vertical portals are known as "vertical information portals" (VIPs). VIPs provide news, editorial content, digital publications, and E-Commerce capabilities. In contrast to traditional vertical portals, VIPs also provide dynamic multimedia applications including social networking, video posting, and blogging.
(2) Horizontal portal:
As you might have guessed, a horizontal market is 90 degrees from a vertical market. A vertical market concentrates on a specific industry; a horizontal market can serve pretty much anyone.
A horizontal portal appeals to a wide audience. Yahoo UK or MSN UK are prime examples. They offer their users gateways to the web with convenient links to breaking news, social media, sports, horoscopes, etc. They are a bit like opening the Sunday newspaper, where you get a choice of many interesting topics to sit and browse at will.

A horizontal portal is used as a platform to several companies in the same economic sector or to the same type of manufacturers or distributors. These are web portals which focus on a wide array of interests and topics. They focus on general audience and try to present something for everybody. Horizontal portals try act as an entry point of a web surfer into the internet, providing content on the topic of interest and guiding towards the right directions to fetch more related resources and information. Classic examples of horizontal portals are yahoo.com, msn.com etc which provide visitors with information and on a wide area of topics. They are often referred to as “mega portals”, target the entire internet community. Sites like “http://www.yahoo.com” “http://www.netscape.com”

These sites always contain search engines and provide the ability for a user to personalize the page by offering various channels(i.e.) access to the other information such as regional weather, stock quotes, or news updates. The Providers of mega portals hope the individual users to go their sites first, so as to access the rest of the internet. Their financial models are built on a combination of advertising and/or “click-through” revenues.

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Titany answered the question on September 23, 2021 at 13:24