Are Aggregators Pressing the Panic Button?

Suddenly, the role of aggregators in mobile content is being questioned again..with the rise of master tones (real song clips), a lot of naysayers in the industry are beginning to doubt the role of the middlemen. This is nothing new, of course, to the point of being a cliche…(hey, even New Yorker did a story on it…)
Right now, the mobile content industry is a one-legged stool, at least in U.S.: music. But as U.S. catches up to the rest of the world, other entertainment content like mobile gaming is beginning to look feasible. And the aggregators, for them to survive, need to be constantly re-inventing themselves. That again, is a cliche, but cliches are true for a reason…
Are the aggregators pushing the panic button? Speaking to a lot of them at two conferences over the last week, I don’t get that feeling. What’s surely happening (again, at least in U.S.) is a lot of restructuring, and hopefully, upscaling of core operations.
For example, take InfoSpace Mobile…it is among the biggest aggregators, and has the most to lose, if the middlemen disappear. So what does it do: it has bought a slew of companies over the last year and formed a game unit out of it.
A company like Mforma (which was never heavily dependent on mobile music) quickly become a publisher, from being an aggregator.
The key being rising up the value chain to become a publisher…aggregators are always ascendant in the early days of an industry, and then they seem to be perishable. And then they make a comeback, again. Never underestimate the role of being lean. Remember Yahoo, anyone?

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