The fact is that there are millions and millions of consumers, but they all tend to go to a relatively small number of sites. A typical listing of the most visited sites will include Google, MSN, Wikipedia, eBay, Yahoo and so on. A second tier below this would include sites that are somewhat more demographically targeted, such as MySpace, YouTube, Face Book, etc. Below this would be larger national and regional sites. Under that would come local social networking, entertainment and news sites. Finally, at the bottom of the heap you would find the individual sites of businesses.
The conical characteristic of a heap means that the vast number of sites is at the bottom, while very few attract vast numbers of users. In other words, one single site will not reach millions of users unless it is unique, dynamic and touches a chord with web users that draw them back to it time and time again. Every year, millions of sites are published. Only a handful becomes popular.
The question becomes how to draw attention to online marketing initiatives? The baseline prerequisites are a subscriber list and accompanying e-mail, as well as dynamic (changing) content. However this may not be enough. Search engine optimisation and other tricks can help, but come at a cost, as do Ad Words and other schemes to pull traffic from search engines.
The answer involves a lovely bit of twisted logic. If you assume that an internet user visits three or four of the most relevant sites in any search, then by joining forces with those sites and bundling the information contained on those individual sites into one site, it should be possible to better attract the user to that content based on the combined relevance plus the ability to compare.
By analogy, in real life, people don’t go to individual manufacturers to buy each and every product that they use on a day-to-day basis. They go to the supermarket. In the supermarket, typical competition is set aside in favour of reach to the widest number of consumers. Information is a day-to-day commodity.
However this does not spell the end of the website of the individual organisation. The individual organisation still needs to place its information in its own terms. The group website reaches those people who want a wide range of comparable information presented in a similar format and setting, plus the convenience of limiting searches. And, typically, it can direct users to the individual organisation’s website. So the key to the matter is to develop a site for the organisation, and find portals on which to be present.
Although this may seem like a duplication of effort, there are a number of factors, inherent to the portal that needs to be taken into account.
The first is that a site needs to be dynamic to attract repeat views. This means that the site owner has to generate news. And if there is no news, then the visitor count falls. By joining forces with others, the amount of news multiplies.
Secondly, the multiplicity of newsletters diminishes. Typically, sites need to have a newsletter component to attract visitors to its new content. With more participants on one portal, the number of newsletters decreases and the reader is attracted to the most relevant with the widest variety of content.

Thirdly, the cost decreases, as the multiple users increase the economies of scale on the portal.

And finally, there is typically a large amount of subsidiary information contained on the site. By participating on the site, the organisation does not have to generate that secondary information, but can redirect visitors from its own site to the portal.