Is Aggregation a Good Web Business Model?

The latest trend on the Internet (and it's been happening for several years now) are sites devoted to aggregated web content. It seems to me there are four steps to the new Internet wealth.

1. Build an online community around a specific interest -shiny new gadgets, sports, politics, environment, fuzzy plush toys - just about anything.

2. Then build traffic by adding catchy article captions, reader voting and comments.

3. Charge advertisers on a page view basis to place ads.

4. Repeat (with new site & topic).

I wonder whether this is a sustainable business model, for a couple of reasons.

First, search engines continue to evolve and when they get to the point that they can return results based upon theme related RSS feeds, the content aggregators' efforts will be rendered moot. It's only a matter of time.

The second reasons is that, aside from aggregating content, many of these site offer little added value - no in depth insights, editorials or other original content - just catchy article titles, with a link back to the originating story or press release.

They are in the "look at me" business. That's exactly the magic behind Digg - except that they've introduced viewer "voting", increasing the visitor participation factor, making their site more "sticky".

I wonder about the effectiveness of the advertising on these sites. My gut tells me that over time there's very little click through and far fewer purchases. Marketers are attracted to theses sites because of the traffic. The same reasoning applies when they continue to buy traditional TV advertising or when they put up billboards on heavily travelled highways.

In an age of permission marketing and viral marketing, where consumers grant you permission to tell them about products and services they're interested in (and spread the word about your product if they like it), I wonder how much longer advertisers will continue to spend their money without seeing significant results?

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to add AdSense to my blog.