Revenue from most portal businesses have started with banner advertising, then progress through stages of product or service or content sales, and eventually move toward full electronic commerce.

The components of portal revenue models are briefly described:

	Advertising. By far the largest component of portal revenue, and in fact Internet revenue in general, is the selling of space on the portal for advertisers to display banners, linked, offers etc. For many portal sites advertising revenue represents greater than 80% of their total revenue.
	Product/Service sales. Hard goods purveyors, like Amazon.com, Cisco, Dell, Federal Express, Microwarehouse, and many others have established a strong foothold in the online purchasing of products or services using the Internet.
	Referral Sales Commissions. For certain products like books, a popular method for portals is to provide their community products that are of particular interest to that community. In many cases, the portal company does not inventory these products but rather hands the order off to a product company. From that hand off, the portal receives a referral sales commission.
	Auctions. Popularized by eBay, more portals are setting up auction centers. Members of the community can post an item for sale, bids are taken and the highest bidder buys the item. For this service a portal receives a fee from the seller.
	Reverse Auctions. Reverse auctions may be the most powerful and paradigm changing concept on the web. In reverse auction, the company posts its need for a product or service (much like a requirements document or RFP) on the portal website, and takes bids (proposals) from any party that wishes to "deal". The company then evaluates the bids and selects a vendor. The portal company facilitates this process and collects a fee.
	Exchange Point for Goods and Services. An advanced form of the previous three categories, the exchange point becomes the trading center for goods and services. Electronically guests and sellers meet on the portal, exchange information, negotiate contracts, ship goods and receive payments. When fully implemented, this process looks like an electronic equivalent to today’s corporate purchase order system. It is often called electronic contracting. The portal site can provide on one of three major roles in these transactions. First, they can facilitate the process and receive a fee. Second, they can conduct the sale and receive a percentage commission (e.g. 15% of purchase price). Or third, the portal can be the reseller and receive a margin on the sale.
	Fee-based Transaction Services. This revenue is almost identical to magazine subscriptions. The community member pays a monthly fee to use a service or access content (e.g. Wall Street Journal, Gartner Group, E*Trade, others). The portal may own the service or they may receive a fee for referring a member to the service site, serving as a gateway.
	"Taste Test" generates Subscription. This is a variation of fee-based transactions using a popular concept called "taste test". As the name implies, the community member gets to sample the information or service for free, but at a certain point (typically based on trial period of time or detail of information content accessed) the member purchases the service or pays for each report accessed. The portal is usually the operator of the free service and receives a fee for all access to upgraded content or products.
	Added Data Content Collection Point and Resell. As community members use the portal to exchange information among the members, the portal owner often will host new information that becomes valuable (e.g. member surveys and product ratings). The portal in turn packages the accumulated information and offers a new or expanded information service. Obviously, with new content come new subscription or transaction fees.
	Build Community with goal to be acquired by another Portal. A longer-term source of revenue for a portal can be its acquisition by a larger portal player. In current times, analysts suspect this may be the prime driver of many portal start-ups. You simply grow the membership base as fast as possible ("attract eyeballs"), and sell the web portal community to another web portal company for a handsome gain.

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