(* Source: Eric Alterman *) 

Widget providers increasingly are bypassing portals and distributing content directly to user-controlled pages, requiring portals to evolve. KickApps' founder explains.

The universe of websites has a very long tail, and soon it will be clear that earning real estate on those websites will be the primary mission of every major portal. Widgets will play an ever-increasing role in this evolution.

Prediction: Portals like AOL, MSN and Yahoo will eventually generate more impressions and ad inventory by exporting widgets to third-party websites than by serving retail traffic within their own domains.

Most people are still trying to figure out what widgets really are and their importance, but few are looking at the role traditional internet portals will play in this new ecosystem. The major content portals like AOL and Yahoo used to define "distribution" when it came to web content (as both creators and acquirers of original content). Then widgets came along and increasingly "distributed" that distribution power to individuals and their personal pages (e.g. social networking pages, blogs).

The problem for traditional portals is that content producers and third-party widget providers increasingly have convenient ways to bypass portals by distributing content and other user experiences directly to consumer-controlled pages. While the major portals often own social network traffic (e.g. AIM Pages) and feed aggregators (e.g. MyYahoo), that traffic increasingly is splintered by third-party content and widget providers. In short, the entire web community is aggressively fishing in portal waters, and there are good reasons to expect that trend to accelerate.

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