Briefly on the AOL Huffington Post deal. Eyeballs matter. Except when they don't.

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You want more details on the AOL - Huffington Post acqui-merger, you have come to the wrong place. I'll say this: good for both of them. AOL, by the sheer grace of a benevolent God, still makes money off of dial-up. If they are not going to return those profits to stakeholders, buying up web content is probably the next best thing, given their skill set. Years ago I read a book about Picasso. It was by Arianna Huffington. Pretty sure it's the same woman who started Huffington Post. I don't know how much money or time she put into the site but if *anyone* offers $300 plus million for a content site, take it and run.

So, wise move by both.

But I don't think this will work. The time for "aggregating eyeballs" as the beautiful people say has, I think, come and gone. There's money in it, sure, but it's a never ending battle to get more eyeballs, more clicks, more page views; diminishing returns. Just last week I wrote that Michael Arrington should make sure he gets first rights to buy back TechCrunch -- for pennies on the dollar -- because the whole eyballs strategy is morphing; limiting its potential. Yes, those who can establish a 'beachfront' property on the web can command premium ad dollars. And there will likely always be products, like Toothpaste or Hollywood films where lots of ads, repeated over and over, help spur sales.

Nonetheless, that big 'portal' of content, visited by millions everyday, is no guarantee of success (measured in terms of actual return on investment). THe future is the smartphone. We are viewing more and more content on these tiny screens. The smartphone is integrated with our location, our relationships, our needs at that moment. I am sure there will always be millions of people who wake up on a Monday that want to check out the 'must read' article on the Black Eyed Peas performance on the Super Bowl. But that will soon become secondary to content that is recommended to us by our smartphones, because our smartphone knows where we are, who we are chatting with, what our 'status' is, what time of day it is and what we have been doing up to this point.

Information wants to be monetized. AOL and Huffington Post have done well with this deal. Because neither had other legitimate options. BUt I think the smartphone will alter what we read, where we go (on the web) and what we focus on. These sites built for page views and eyeballs are going to decrease in relevance, which means they decrease in holding our attention, which means they decrease on the power of ads. Time for a new model.