Keith Teare has an interesting post over on the Edgio blog, De-portalization and Internet Revenues.

He’s basically saying that the giant portals, like Yahoo and Google will gradually flatten out — see his great mountain graphics — in favour of content platforms from smaller publishers. These will use techniques to drive and distribute traffic flows and collectively become much more important, relatively speaking, than the big players.

Publisher driven revenue models will increasingly replace middlemen. There will be no successful advertiser driven models in the foothills, only publisher centric models. Successful platform vendors will put the publisher at the center of the world in a sellers market for eyeballs. There will be more publishers able to make $180,000 a month [like TechCrunch].

Regular readers will know that this is a viewpoint I’ve been pushing here for some time. He continues :

“Smart [software] companies will (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.”

I really couldn’t put it better. Our philosophy in a nutshell. Great news that Edgio is going to roll out some supporting products in coming weeks.

One to watch.