One obvious shift is the increased interest of portal players in having their own content, something that we can fairly say is extended into the TV space by the recently approved Comcast/NBCU deal. Ads have to live in something that consumers want in order to be pulled into view, and so all ad sponsorship (and pretty much all of the online world) has to have that magnetic content.

It used to be that you could act as a portal by simply aggregating everyone else’s content, a move that played to early desire by practically every business and content producer to have a web presence. AOL’s decision to buy the Huffington Post (a growing liberal media site) reflects the reality that most content sites are now looking at monetization on their own. That means that portal/aggregator sites have less to work with—unless they start becoming producers.

What’s interesting about both the Comcast and AOL decision is that the choice is one of buying professional content and not going with the “crowdsource” trend that’s obviously cheaper. Google’s challenge in monetizing YouTube is most likely the reason, and the fact that crowdsourced portals would start to look a lot like social networks. Been there, done that.

Yahoo! is the poster child for the other shift—we’re seeing the semantic web not as an Internet trend but as an aggregator trend. Think “semantic portal.” The idea is to combine search and context with portals and targeting to produce relevant content for consumers. The relevance factor makes the portal more attractive, and presumably would therefore help Yahoo! monetize its higher overall scores at serving content to consumers (Yahoo! beat Google slightly in unique visitors, for example, in comScore results). That might let Yahoo! pay more for content and dodge the pay-wall trend.

What all this means, of course, is that the bloom is off the rose. We’re past the growing-up phase of the online world and into the hard business middle-age. I’ve noted issues of maturity as they apply to the ISPs in the last couple of posts, and the new trends show that maturity is upon even the OTT players. The question is how much of the online revolution is a fad. Here in the U.S., where alternative channels of information dissemination are the richest in the world, we have the lowest online penetration and the least interest in getting online among those not there already.

Does that mean that we’re already seeing an opt-out effect? It doesn’t seem so, but it does appear that we’re seeing the lack of universal opting in. That could be a result of a lack of “fad sensitivity” among a segment of the population. If so, the effect could spread as having your own personal website or being on Facebook or Twitter, or even playing with a smartphone at a party, ceases to be cool. Not only do we have to worry about reinventing the Internet as a network, we have to reinvent the coolness model every year or so, because the requirements to achieve the cool state shift rapidly. Good thing I gave up years ago!

 At one level, something like this is inevitable.  AOL and Yahoo are both brands past their prime, victims of change (in the first case), and of competition and complacency (in the second).  We think that’s the big issue here. We’ve got a marriage of inconvenience, a union being proposed where neither party brings really strong assets to the table.  AOL died in all but the real sense when broadband replaced dial-up, and Yahoo is dying not only from Google but from the fact that more users are abandoning search in favor of social networks.

 The big revolution online is yet to come.  Just as we didn’t want to be informed by the Internet when there was an entertainment alternative, we don’t want to be social only while sitting in front of our computers.  Appliances like iPhones and iPads are now driving the bus for the Internet’s future.  Applications not only make information anonymous, they make the Net anonymous itself.  You push a button and you get your answer; magic might as easily deliver it as search.  We’re mashing social networks to increasingly look like SMS.  In the drive to socially connect, we’re pulling everything that could be a differentiator out of the process of being online.

Social networking and apps are their own worst enemies. They’re creating a world where there’s no room for billboards, and they’re funded by the expectations of those who want those billboards in everyone’s line of sight.  This conflict will self-limit the whole social network process, and so invalidate anyone’s deal for Facebook.  It will also reshape the market so thoroughly that older brands have no meaning, making the Yahoo/AOL alliance kind of like ignoring the lifeboat as the Titanic goes down and holding onto another drowning victim instead.  All these guys need to examine the future more carefully, because the present is becoming the past.

Both companies had little choice but to do something, and the outcome is far from certain in both cases. AOL’s People Networks may be its best hope, and Bartz will have to quickly come to terms with the Microsoft search sell-off opportunity, which Balmer has indicated won’t be on the table forever. We think Yahoo may be thinking of a more software-intensive position in the future.

Google, meanwhile, may be in for a surprisingly strong Q4 according to one research firm, who says its ads rose 58% in the quarter.