Hong Kong's wealth of financial portals shows a need for consolidation

Of all the dull and uninspired ideas to have appeared during Hong Kong's brief fling with the dotcom craze, the most uninspired but imitated is the financial portal.

The concept took no imagination. A couple of years ago, everyone wanted to be a portal. They did their best to hire reasonable designers and to copy the best features from other portals, but it soon became apparent that most portals did not make money.

The investors went back to the drawing board. After analysing the market, they realised the truth. It was not their fault at all. They had done nothing wrong, it was the users' fault. The visitors were too cheap.

Overnight, half of Hong Kong's Internet firms set out to relaunch their dull and generic consumer Web portals as dull and generic financial portals.

In place of the general news, downloads, forums, freemail, links and delayed stock quotes would come financial news, downloads, forums, freemail, links and delayed stock quotes.

Our financial portals are not all bad. Thanks to an early start, Hong Kong is streets ahead of most Asian cities in the quality of online analysts. But we do have too many portals, with little to distinguish most.