Steve Rubel, who has to be one of the cleverest people I know, recently posted an article over on his blog entitled ‘In the cut and paste era, traffic happens elsewhere‘ in which he suggests that unique content generators such as news services and major portals are facing challenge from sites that’ll enable you to create your own customized view of the world with rss feeds, links and synopses of content – losing them the ‘first touch’ consumer view.

As I see it these portals are between a rock and a hard place.

By creating applications and feeds they’re allowing the consumer to get content from them without first visiting.

This means that browsing behaviour will change from an automatic open and the impression opportunity that goes with it to one where the content featured in the apps or feeds will have to be so appealing that it compels the reader to click for more.

This will result in lower impressions but certainly be a boon for those sites that feature contextually relevant advertising. No longer will the traditional services such as MSN, CNN or Yahoo dominate purely through brand power, they’ll compete on an even footing with sites that offer insightful content and a focused niche.

However, if they don’t offer the services they risk losing visibility to the consumer as they start creating their own Start Pages using tools such as netvibes, where I’ve created a page that reflects my personal needs!

This is great news for those advertisers that are not able to get territory on the large portals as typically the niche content sites offer more opportunity for innovative business models such as affiliate marketing or hybrid performance based advertising.

The ‘bad’ news is that your offer will have to be so much more compelling as publishers that take advantage of this ‘distributed content’ phenomenon will be inundated with offers and may find that their advertising space can be sold at a premium.

What out… new online advertising trend headed our way!

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