My opinion is that personalizing the microsite is going to depend on what tools are available to people wanting to customize their experience (a browser add on) and what tools the site provider is willing to make available.
For example, let's say the NYTimes and WashingtonPost portlets are side by side in a browser "window". The portlet making the most advertising dollars is the one you spend the most time in. How does NYT or WP insure you spend the most time in their portlet? By letting you customize it to the point it's no longer recognizable as the NYT or WP portlet. But at that level of customization, is there still room for their advertisers in the portlet?
Any service that is provided for free isn't really provided for free and I use the newspaper portlet idea intentionally. People could subscribe to a newspaper but all that did was pay for delivery, if that. The real money came from advertising dollars and the newspaper got advertising dollars by showing how many subscribers it had.
This "Somebody's gotta pay" model is also true for the internet. The cost of internet publishing is much less than print and most print outlets are now becoming indicia of their related websites. Still, a large paper's online publication costs are substantial and advertising revenues are still derived by the number of subscribers, number of unique visitors, number of downloads, ...
If I, the consumer, am totally paying for my portlet then I can customize it the way I want. This also means that I have to pay for any content I pull from NYT, WP, etc., to place in my portlet. How much am I, the consumer, willing to let NYT, WP, etc., subsidize my personal experience by providing me their content? Even if they don't put their advertising in my feed, they're still dropping cookies all over the place when I do so.
That's what I'm thinking right now, anyway. Let me know what you think, and thanks.
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- Coming Soon: The Death of the Web Page
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