Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Flickr.com at around 4,000 Daily Reach/million is in the same order of magnitude scale as myspace.com, albeit about a fifth its size.  So it is a big guy.

Flickr and Del.icio.us are similarly scaled, with the later coming up fast.

And both are bigger than stalwart Salon.com:

Some say that making new news aggregators is lame and that the aggregator wars are over. 

And yet the community keeps coming up with them.

What I wonder is this:

At what scale can an aggregator become self-sufficient on ads, and at what scale can one become self-sufficient on subscriptions?

In business strategy terms:  What is the “minimum efficient/profitable scale” for a news aggregator?  That is, what is the minimum scale that will support a viable aggregator business?

I think that the minimum scale may be very very small, and that there will be more and more specialized aggregators out there.  Many of them may be viable economically, because their development and operational costs will be low.

We may have a long tail of successful aggregators, and an industry structure that is NOT dominated by a few players.  The exception will be that portals such as Yahoo will add aggregator features, and of course will start out at large scale.  But this  may not diminish the appetite of advanced users for advanced aggregators.

Here is a case in point: Rojo looks pretty good as a long tail company, even though it is not growing like Newsgator, which in turn is not growing like Bloglines.  Perhaps all can co-exist and grow?

Pubsub is a nice, foundational service, but compared to topix.net, it is not moving much at all.

Bloglines and Topix.net were neck and neck until December.  What happened? How did Bloglines pull ahead?

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