De-portalization: how audience is moving to the long tail

The distribution of traffic between centralised portals and the long tail of smaller sites will flatten out, argues Keith Teare on the Edgio blog. While the top sites will continue to expand, this will be outstripped by the growth of traffic in the long tail of smaller sites – what he calls the “foothills” against the portals’ “mountains”.

Fred Wilson coined the term de-portalization to describe this trend (something of a misnomer so he’s looking for suggested improvements). Fred’s view: “my guess is if you looked at the percent of all pageviews that are generated each month, a much smaller portion exist on the top 10 properties today than in 2000, at the height of the first Internet era”.

Keith argues the top sites need to move beyond a centralised model with services that harness the long tail of traffic and content, and should:

(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.

A few interesting follow-ups from:

• Scott Karp: Platforms are the new portals
• Matthew Ingram: What the heck is a portal anyway?