The head of Excite.co.uk says the advertising slump is not to blame for the collapse of her company or that of other failed dot.coms.
Rebecca Miskin said the effect of falling revenues has been grossly exaggerated.
"The fall in ad revenue has had less effect online than in newspapers or broadcasting," she said.
"It's a great excuse but it's only one of a number of contributing factors. We're seeing a shift in the economic cycle and there will be casualties in every sector."
Ms Miskin conceded that any chance of a rescue bid was unlikely once shareholder Excite@home went bankrupt last month, leading to today's announcement and the loss of 48 jobs.
"Once Excite@home applied for bankruptcy we were unable to guarantee potential investors that we would still have a technical infrastructure, which made any deal very unlikely," she said.
Up to that point, several companies were interested in rescuing the business.
Remaining at the company to oversee the shutdown and sale of remaining assets, Ms Miskin refused to criticise investors BT and Excite@home.
However, she insisted Excite.co.uk was a solid business that would have survived had it not fallen victim to the woes of its parent companies.
While Excite@home had troubles of its own, fellow shareholder BT was struggling with a debt mountain and looking to reduce its stake in joint venture companies.
"It has delivered against all the core indicators that we prescribed a year ago. Once it became clear that it was a non-core business to both shareholders it was always going to be difficult in the current climate," she said.
Despite the collapse of Excite, and turbulent times for other advertising-led portals such as Yahoo! and Lycos, Ms Miskin said she believed there was a bright future ahead for general interest portals.
"There's still a fantastic opportunity for portals going forward. They won't look like they do today but they have opportunity to be the place where newspapers and technology meet," she said.
The rise and fall of Excite is perhaps the best example yet of the mammoth expansion fever of the dot.com boom and its subsequent fallout.
Excite.com, the US company that launched one of the first portals on the web in the early 90s, merged with broadband provider @home in a multimillion pound deal hailed as a convergent masterstroke.
Within months, however, it became clear that the slow rollout of broadband and the plummeting advertising market spelled trouble for the company.
It sought a £5bn merger with UPC Media's Chello but the deal disintegrated over financing arrangements.
Scrambling for survival, Excite@home vowed to sell its portal business and looked to have agreed a deal with shareholder AT&T to sell its cable network.
But when that deal fell apart it was forced to admit defeat.
