The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article today (April 14) by Kevin J. Delaney entitled "Yahoo 'Hybrid' Now Dominates News Web Sites."

The gist of the story is that Yahoo's news site run with a mere 15 people and Search technology is outdrawing cnn.com in terms of unique visitors in many of the last few month (over 20 million).

This trend is sure to accelerate in coming months and years. As Search technology gets more sophisticated, the ability to ferret out vertical and horizontal news stories with few "people editors" is going to place a great strain on traditional news organizations' print and online assets. And of course we know that where the eyeballs go is where the ad dollars go.

I have written about a niche company that Jupitermedia has an investment in called mdlinx.com. Using a handful of medical editors based in India and Search technology, mdlinx is able to push daily via email newsletters hundreds of pertinent medical articles to over 37,000 physicians (geared to specific specialties)throughout the world. While a tiny operation compared to Yahoo, this specialized site is able to garner CPM's of well over $150! I doubt there are many Web sites that surpass these CPM numbers?

My point is that while the Yahoo news operation story is significant, the opportunity is immense for small verticals such as the mdlinx example. There must be hundreds if not thousands of mdlinx clones that will never be written about in The Wall Street Journal, but which are making great business success stories.

The beauty of the Internet Age is that we are still only at the beginning of the revolution for ecommerce and information business opportunities in almost any interest area.

This trend poses serious problems for large media conglomerates. They should be running around the world buying up these niche players to protect themselves from the certain cannibalization of their "cash cow" properties. There is no stopping the Net.