Drivers of Web portal use

In this paper, we investigate three complementary measures of portal use: frequency of use, length of visits and repeat use. To examine these three measures of use, we first classify the services provided by portals into three categories: search, information, and personal services. We argue that these three different functions affect portal use in different ways. We primarily rely on the human computer interaction literature to develop our model of portal use. Our analysis is based on Internet navigation data of 102 demographically diverse users over a period of one year for six major portals. In total, we study 6321 distinct portal choices. Our results show strong repeat use for personal services followed by information services and search function. Our findings show that cumulative dissatisfaction with search results has a negative effect on future user choice decisions. Both information and personal services tend to extend the length of portal visits. As expected, search services tend to reduce the time spent as users move on to the search targets. But we also find that search function availability drives more traffic to portals than information or personal services. Of the three services, personal services use shows maximum (week-to-week) stability, information services use, on the other hand, shows least stability. Use of personal services leads to use of search and information services. We also find that demographic characteristics play some role in portal use. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.