Scott provided a timely picture of Yahoo in the post Lloyd Braun era, a portrait that detailed reinvigorated efforts to build the Web's leading destination content. Their new mission statement: "To connect people to their passions, their communities and the world's knowledge." When Scott first came to Yahoo their external content was mostly traditional news wire feeds, but Braun got people thinking in terms of story-telling instead of just traditional aggregation. Yahoo has the largest reach, but engagement of content was relatively low compared to competitors, so more interactivity was needed to lead people into interesting content journeys. Yahoo has been working hard to infuse social media elements into all of their properties, moving far beyond message boards to integrate it with licensed content and original content.
Yahoo's partnering with traditional media companies gives them a powerful context for their content - about 80 percent of the content on Yahoo is licensed from other sources - and fills gaps with their own content where they see non-competitive openings. Scott highlighted the
partnership with CBS News' 60 Minutes program to develop a compelling destination portal. For their Tiger Woods edition of the show people wound up spending more time watching the rich content on the Yahoo site. Last fall the term "60 minutes" began to outpace searches for competitor's TV shows - in part due to the portal presence.
The McClatchy partnership is yielding content from around the world, but instead of just licensing tradtional feeds they decided to try some blogging. Scott showed slides of reporters reporting directly from around the world in Yahoo-formatted blog entries. There are now 264 companies in the Yahoo newspaper consortium, hoping to help them complement their strengths with online platforms, products and both national and international sales strength.
Scott demonstrated a section on the Yahoo! News home page in which local news headlines from RSS feeds are inserted, which enable about 15 million clicks a month to be sent out to local news providers. [COMMENT: smart, about time. This is something that the newspapers are shy to do themselves and it will cost them.] There are now about 36 million users of Yahoo! news - numbers that any newspaper would be glad to have.
Fantasy sports is a natural choice for social media, with users contributing lots of content that engages audiences. Yahoo! Sports has engagement levels that "dwarfs" their competitors, Scott says. Yahoo! YouWitness News makes it easy for people to upload news, but Scott indicates that he thinks that it will take a while to get used to uploading news. [COMMENT: the slowness from Yahoo's perspective may be individuals who are mindful of how they manage their own personal content brands. Are they all ready to give their brands to Yahoo? Yahoo's branding is too heavy in social media for many who are the most self-aware personal publishers.] Yahoo also gives tools to U.S. Presidential candidates to communicate more effectively, knowing that social media is going to play an enormous role in this sorting out a very open-ended field of candidates.
Kevin Sites' reporting from the field is but one example of original reporting offered by Yahoo, along with sports, money, food, technology and other key topics. Yahoo! News Underground brings stories from eccentric communities, bringing a street-savvy view of society. [COMMENT: Again, as I've mentioned elsewhere, this will go somewhere but when people can build their own communities I have my doubts that "underground" branding will be effective in the long run. The Web as a whole is a more effective way to tune into these communities - and it underscores the lost opportunity in not having acquired YouTube.]
Yahoo! Brand Universe helps them to leverage the key consumer brands in which they are deep in content to help consolidate people's interests. By putting the brand in the center of the experience people can navigate their relevant content and keep people immersed in both the consumer brand and the Yahoo brand. [COMMENT: Good stuff, but as we've noted before, this is something that the consumer brands should be doing themselves. That could create opportunities for Yahoo and others to license their content to the brands themselves.]
All good stuff, and demonstrating how Yahoo is the most savvy and powerful packager of traditional media and is becoming a strong force for packaging social media alongside it. The ability to aggregate both content and communities gives them a powerful edge over most traditional media brands. When you look at a Yahoo you see a company that has invested heavily in technology to create an integrated and relatively neutral environment that allows audiences to explore and find content in ways that most media companies are nowhere near ready to provide. When you look at Fox Interactive Media, FIM bought MySpace, which was actually pretty poor from a technology and usability perspective, the acquisition brought very little platform strength to MySpace and few assets that FIM could leverage to build other properties. On the other side of the coin, more source-neutral aggregators such as Google that allow both buyers and consumers to meet in an environment where the Google brand is less overshadowing offer cost-effective solutions to allow audiences to go wherever content takes them - not just to Google's own platforms. But these are largely complimentary outlooks, each of which is not likely to disappear any time soon. Food for thought, and powerful food at that.
Labels: SIIA Content Forum 2007, Yahoo
