Portals are the Supermarkets with Virtual Shelves

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In his book The Paradox of Choice[not an associate link], Barry Schwartz says that, “20,000 new products hit the supermarket every year, almost all of them doomed to failure.” Supermarkets love to get new products, if they can be convinced that there are dollars to be earned by “renting” space to these. Because of this and that the shelf lives of almost all of the products are so short they want to have a steady stream of new products lined up. The buyers of supermarket are every busy breed scouting for new products.

The  web portals and content aggregators is not far from supermarkets.  The WSJ says, that

Big Internet companies such as MSN and Yahoo have small teams whose job
it is to “discover” these smaller sites before their competition does.
They scan the Web, attend industry conferences and hobnob with
start-ups to get names of talented but obscure content providers. Marty
Moe, vice president and general manager for AOL Money & Finance,
says he has started making informal deals with smaller blogs and other
sites in order to fast-track the process.

There are millions of content producers (including this blog) all vying for the scarce attention of users. The Yahoo and MSN try to be the middleman, the supermarket shelves for all these new content produced every second. There is not need to worry about the shelf life of these smaller content producers, there are millions to come every year. The only concern for the “buyers” in portal supermarkets is to find those handful of one hit wonders and get them to produce that one hit while occupying your site’s real estate.

Would you have read about this blog’s post on Sprint’s move to Tear down the walled garden if not for getting shelf space on GigaOm, a 7-11 (so to speak) of content providers?

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