Assigning market value to a portion of a company is tricky. Time Warner, you'd think, is both "content" and "portal." Microsoft, equally, has only a small portion of its value wrapped up in Portal land. Yahoo! and Google, certainly, are mostly portal, where eBay's business is now far less (how much less is anyone's judgment -- Skype's value could be anything from a few hundred million to $20 billion, depending on your faith in the VoIP business model).

In any case, the combined market capitalization of all five companies is $515 billion at the time of this post (TWX - $73B; GOOG - $122B; MSFT - $237B; EBAY - $40B; YHOO - $45B). Perhaps Hindery just assigned an arbitrary number to AOL and MSN ... say, $20 billion each, and chopped a little off Google's market cap for good measure. Time Warner presents an interesting case, with both proprietary content and portal-by-advertising, at once proving and disproving Hindery's claim: certainly, AOL has been moving in the direction of offering more proprietary content through its own divisions and through partnerships with many of the content providers at the Time Warner side. However, the AOL acquisition has done nothing for Time Warner's market value -- if Hindery is right, the value would simply be shifting from one division to another, and would have remained largely the same over the past several years.

Either way it's hard for me to follow him down this road -- I think the advertising model is a great one, although I'd agree that creating proprietary content is always a good idea (hey, that's my livelihood, I have all my eggs in that basket, so to speak). And we can all be certain that his analysis is colored by the fact that his livelihood is cable.

A little feedback from the bloggers:

• "Ballsy" - Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
• "Most people look to their broadband provider as nothing more than a pipe. They want the pipe separated from the rest of the content and services that are offered... Of course, at the same time, Hindery seems to (again, like a traditional cable guy) completely discount the fact that people go online for communications just as much, if not more, than content." -- Mike from Techdirt (who also points out the AOL problem)
• "This guy is on crack ... if [the telcos and cable companies] could build a better google or yahoo, they would have." -- ScaredoftheMan commenting on Techdirt
• "I do agree that $225B for a few portals that have relatively little in terms of a financial / proprietary "moat" to protect that valuation - WILL result in a transfer of that wealth to new players." -- The Shadow commenting on CNN Money's The Browser
• " A lot of dreaming lately by folks whose baggage is clearly lost somewhere over 1994. ... But Hindrey is also missing that the business model of controlling proprietary content due to massive capital outlays and control of distribution channels is, well, no longer the only game in town. There's a new distribution sheriff in town, and his name is search. His deputy is the open Internet. Get used to it. It's not going to go away." -- John Battelle's Searchblog