• Forbes.com, Tuesday, October 9, 2007 11:15 AM

One of Yahoo's most valuable areas is news. In the last few years, the Web giant has firmly entrenched itself as the No. 1 provider of news on the Internet in all the major categories: general, financial and sports. An astonishing two in five users reads Yahoo News--or 50 million people per month, according to comScore, which is more than Google News, even.

As the Forbes report suggests, here's your business model for the future--Web portals. The strongest selling point for content aggregators like Yahoo, AOL and MSN is their transformation into "power hubs" for news. Forget original content, forget traditional media content--over the course of a month, Web portals provide news to more people per month than the broadcast networks. And there is still room for growth: operating costs for the news departments are low because they are mostly aggregators.

As such, the most important point of differentiation for Yahoo and its competitors is how their role as filters for online news is consumed. Not only do the portals let users customize their news, but they can also customize it for them by monitoring the content their users consume. "As filters for how more people consume their news, the online sites are more important than they ever have been," says Craig Forman, EarthLink executive vice president and former head of Yahoo media and information. "They're supplanting the role of traditional media in how consumers get their news."

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