Delfi seen as leading Internet portal in Estonia

TALLINN (BNS) - Estonia's three largest Internet portals are vying for market leadership but thus far Delfi has a good lead over Mega and Everyday, the daily Postimees reported.

Last week Delfi.ee emerged as the leader, not only among portals, but among all Web sites in the country, in terms of contacts, marketing manager Allan Sombri said.

"We collected 1.7 million contacts last week," he told the daily.

According to figures from Tele2, the search page Neti.ee did better last week than Delfi.ee with 1.23 million contacts as compared with Delfi's 1.06 million, but Sombri said Delfi's counting system was on the blink for a while and because of this many clicks were not counted. Mega.ee reported 710,000 and Everyday.ee, 385,000 contacts last week.

Delfi's most popular section is its main page Delfi.ee, which focuses on news and comment. It is followed by the portal's women's page and Russian site that are visited far less frequently.

The Delfi portal is making a profit, Sombri said, but not yet able to earn back the couple of million of U.S. dollars invested in it so far.

Delfi.ee earned a record 500,000 kroons ($29,000) from advertising in June, the marketing manager said. The figure is approximately 10 times that of the rival Mega.ee's advertising turnover of more than 50,000 kroons for the same month.