De-portalization

The internet/web experience is moving away from the type of behaviour of using portals, and towards personalization and distribution of a variety of information to the local sites and personal information environments of the users themselves.

For example, through RSS feeds, or Web Widgets

Business Impact of De-portalization

"top 10 things to watch as de-portalization continues..

1. The revenue growth that has characterized the Internet since 1994 will continue. But more and more of the revenue will be made in the foothills, not the mountains.

2. If the major destination sites want to participate in it they will need to find a way to be involved in the traffic that inhabits the foothills.

3. Widgets are a symptom of this need to embed yourself in the distributed traffic of the foothills.

4. Portals that try to widgetize the foothills will do less well than those who truly embrace distributed content, but better than those who ignore the trends.

5. Every pair of eyeballs in the foothills will have many competing advertisers looking to connect with them. Publishers will benefit from this.

6. Because of this competition the dollar value of the traffic that is in the foothills will be (already is) vastly more than a generic ad platform like Google Adsense or Yahoo’s Panama can realize. Techcrunch ($180,000 last month according to the SF Chronicle) is an example of how much more money a publisher who sells advertising and listings to target advertisers can make than when in the hands of an advertiser focused middleman like Google.

7. Publisher driven revenue models will increasingly replace middlemen. There will be no successful advertiser driven models in the foothills, only publisher centric models. Successful platform vendors will put the publisher at the center of the world in a sellers market for eyeballs. There will be more publishers able to make $180,000 a month.

8. Portals will need to evolve into platform companies in order to participate in a huge growth of Internet revenues. Service to publishers will be a huge part of this. Otherwise they will end up like Infospace, or maybe Infoseek. Relics of the past.

9. Search however will become more important as content becomes more distributed. Yet it will command less and less a proportion of the growing Internet traffic.

10. Smart companies will (a) help content find traffic by enabling its distribution. (b) help users find content that is widely dispersed by providing great search. (c) help the publishers in the rising foothills maximize the value of their publications." (http://blog.edgeio.com/?p=57)

More information

Blog commentary at http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/12/the_deportaliza.html