Aggregating the aggregators
The most recent issue of Business 2.0 has a great article by Om Malik on hyperaggregation, or sites that aggregate other sites that do niche aggregation of a specific topic. For example, this blog is an aggregator of web, business, tech news, etc with a local Utah flare. My blog is also hyperaggregated by Connect Magazine that also aggregates other specific bloggers on a variety of topics though mostly focused on business issues. At some point Connect will likely post ads and start earning revenues merely by aggregating the best content. In theory, they will incur little to no content costs. The reason? People pay (in this case via attention and their time) for convenience, so as we get bombarded with even more worthwhile content, expect hyperaggregators to profitably compliment the big aggregators already out there.
Reading the article also makes me a bit sad to remember a project I was working on 9 months ago. It was an editorialized hyperaggregator built in WordPress that aimed to collect the best individual blog posts across a variety of topics. It was aptly named ContentDJ (one of the better site names I think I’ve come up with). Independent publishers signed up with our site for the chance to increase their exposure and ultimately take a cut in future ad revenues. I believe in a short few weeks with no exposure resulted in several hundred independent publishers. Sadly, my funding got cut, the site never left Alpha, and I currently don’t have the resources to keep it going though I still plan on seeing it realized.
On a related note, Griffio won a small account with Podango a few weeks ago to build a website for their newly launched Latest At… service which hyperaggregates the best of the best on big social websites like YouTube, MySpace, even PerezHilton.com. So take note: hyperaggretion will likely do very well in the coming months.