Article at a glance:

E-performance II: The good, the bad, and the merely average

Round two of McKinsey's e-performance scorecard holds some good news for the beleaguered business-to-consumer Internet sector: one dot-com in five is now profitable. The current scorecard also reveals a growing disparity between dot-com winners and losers, with transaction sites collectively creating significantly more value than content sites. And while the performance of Internet retailers—e-tailers—improved somewhat from the previous survey, most media and content sites are going from bad to worse.

The take-away

The era of dot-com profitability may have begun, at least for the highest-performing sites. E-tailers in particular have stronger reasons for optimism than do content and media sites, which continue to search for a winning business model in the face of rising customer acquisition costs and slumping ad revenues.