Not all dot-coms deserve their current beating from investors. Data from more than 200 business-to-consumer (B2C) e-businesses taking part in McKinsey’s latest worldwide e-performance scorecard show that 20 percent of them are making an operating profit. This second round of the scorecard, representing data from the first three quarters of last year, 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.

As in our first survey, the scorecard reveals there is reason to believe that the era of dot-com profitability has 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 advertising revenues.