Aggregate or die

I remember working for a trade magazine that boasted it had a competitive advantage with readers because all their articles were written by staff writers. I still see a sense of pride among traditional publishers as they continue this kind of boasting.

But on the Internet, readers don't care where the content they love comes from, they just want what the content where and when they want it. If an aggregator presents it to them in a more convenient or timely way readers are delighted. 

Case in point is the Huffington Post, which, as the most popular blog in the US, aggregates most of it's content. Compare their rapid growth to that of the New York Times which painstakingly creates most of its content. 

Here are the numbers according to Business Insider:

Two-and-a-half years ago, according to Comscore, the Huffington Post was visited by 1.2 million U.S. uniques a month.  That compared to 11.1 million at the main site of the New York Times, 5.8 million at the Washington Post, 2.8 million at the Wall Street Journal, and 2.6 million at the LA Times.

...Today The Huffington Post has 12.3 million uniques, way ahead of the main sites for Wapo (green line), the WSJ (purple line), and the LAT, which have stagnated.  The Huffington Post (red line) still lags the New York Times (blue line), but not by much--and not for long.

 

Still not convinced? Than consider that the organization that makes far more money on online advertising than anyone is Google. In May of 2010 almost half of all online ad dollars are now going to "search" and Google owns 72% of that market. Do the math. Online, the money is in aggregation, not content creation.

Why? Because the web has so fragmented audiences that aggregation is one of the best ways to assemble the audiences that advertisers want. According to  Adam Gerber, CMO of Quantcast:

In the future, online media buying will be about "the re-aggregation of a fragmented audience that's actually watching different things.”

  The best way to go to market is to have both original content that you brand and present to the market as your own, while also providing the destination for all and any content in your market via aggregation.

Read more about the Huffington Post in Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-news-websites-traffic-2010-5#ixzz0uDYJdUuc     

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