Portals inking lots of deals with niche sites

Cory Bergman November 12th, 2007

With traffic at the major portals beginning to level off, they’re looking to lock in deals with niche sites for fresh, original content. Explains Emily Steele in the WSJ (sub req.): “Big Internet companies such as MSN and Yahoo have small teams whose job it is to ‘discover’ these smaller sites before their competition does. They scan the Web, attend industry conferences and hobnob with start-ups to get names of talented but obscure content providers.” AOL told the Journal that it’s starting to ink informal deals with smaller blogs to fast-track the process, because the contact process “can be slow.”