A colleague forwarded me a fantastic article from Ad Age "It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content is King". The article is worth a read for anyone in the content business. The author, Matthew Creamer, suggests that Web 3.0 will be about monetizing the web's openness and points to examples in the news business of websites aggregating other people's content for profit. Are content aggregators in fact growing in popularity? The author cites Michael Wolff of Newser: "The space is heating up". According to internet usage data, is it?

To continue with the example of the News and Media sector, I looked at the top websites in that category based on share of US Internet visits last week. Yahoo! News was the #1 News and Media website last week and Google News ranked #5. The fact that these two websites rank so highly indicate that there is demand for news aggregators. (Yes, I know that Yahoo! employs a journalist so it is not only a news aggregator but most of the content of the website is taken from other sources so I am counting it as a news aggregator here). Among the top 100 News and Media websites, I found 8 news aggregators, including Yahoo! News, Google News, AOL News and Topix

Visits to these 8 news aggregators grew 11% year on year last week. So yes, content aggregation is increasing in popularity, using website visits as the gauge of popularity. But, the News and Media category as a whole also grew last year - up 10% year on year last week. Looking back two years, visits to the 8 News Aggregators is up 23% and visits to the News and Media category are up 11%.

Growth in visits to the top news aggregators and the top content creators varies widely. Yahoo! News and Google News, the top two News Aggregators grew 8% and 21% respectively year on year last week. Visits to CNN and MSNBC both declined year on year last week, while visits to New York Times, Fox News and Drudge all increased.

Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is - creating all that content is expensive. It's tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create.

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was originally posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here.