Feb 26th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
I don’t know whether Yahoo’s new Buzz feature will actually get any traction, or whether it will be lost in the sea of other Yahoo stuff, or whether it will be orphaned or otherwise screwed up in some way (in the past, any of those options would be a safe bet), but at least the company seems to be trying to do something interesting, which is worth a round of applause all by itself. I think the Digg gang can probably sleep safe at night for a little while, but Yahoo could turn out to be a strong competitor (given all of the caveats mentioned above, of course).
To me, there are two interesting aspects of the service: One is that most-Buzzed-about items will feed into Yahoo’s main news page, and the second is that search results will help determine what moves up the Buzz rankings. Those are two things that Digg can’t really offer — unless it does some partnership deals with Google, of course, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility. It’s true that Digg recently signed a deal with the Wall Street Journal, but I don’t think that’s going to do much to affect the placement of news stories over at WSJ.com anytime soon.
There’s no question that a story on the Yahoo News page can push a gigantic amount of traffic because of Yahoo’s size. It’s still one of the top three news pages on the Web, after all. And it’s possible that having Buzz-worthy stories on there will prove to be a big boost for some blogs and other sites — although Yahoo is starting with a fairly small group of 100 sources. As with Digg, of course, there’s also the risk that Buzz could be gamed. But it’s an interesting experiment nonetheless.
Oct 8th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Thanks to Mike Arrington of TechCrunch for pointing me to a post by Yahoo vice-president of product development Ian Rogers. In the post — entitled “Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses” — Rogers recaps a recent presentation he made about the business of digital music, and as Mike notes it is well worth reading.
The Yahoo VP — who used to run the pioneering music company Winamp, after dropping out of university for a year in 1995 to tour with the Beastie Boys — describes the early days of the digital music game, and his surprise at the combination of fear, ignorance and loathing with which the music industry greeted the arrival of mp3s and services such as Napster:
“We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.”
Fast-forward to today, and Rogers talks about how Amazon has finally created a music-download service that is actually as easy to use as a p2p network — in fact, easier. Unfortunately, he says, it has taken eight years of wasted effort and millions of dollars in legal fees:
“8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.”
As Rogers puts it — before describing the ridiculously convoluted process you have to go through to buy a track and download it through Yahoo Music — “Inconvenience doesn’t scale.” If there is one lesson the music business needs to learn, it is that. It’s true that Apple’s iTunes service has grown to a phenomenal size despite the use of proprietary DRM controls, but think of how much larger the audience for that music could be. As Rogers puts it:
“Platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web are the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.”
Sep 14th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Kara Swisher at All Things D reports that Yahoo has acquired a blog aggregator — or “meme-tracker” — called Buzztracker for the bargain price of $5-million or so. Not a bad payout for a site that appears to have been founded and run by a couple of guys. Co-founder and CEO Alan Warms, who is a friend of VC Fred Wilson’s, becomes general manager of Yahoo News.
I have to confess that while I have heard of Buzztracker, it seems like a distant also-ran in the meme-tracker game. I check Techmeme.com religiously because it is by far the best (most timely, least spam-filled, most efficient at finding new blog posts that are on topic, etc.), and also check Tailrank and Sphere from time to time, but have never paid much attention to Buzztracker. And I don’t think I’m alone in those habits.
Which raises the question: Why did Yahoo buy Buzztracker and not any of those other sites? It’s possible that Yahoo isn’t all that bright, and just picked the first meme-tracker with a cute name, or figured that $5-million is about what Terry Semel blows on the corporate jet every year, so what the heck.
Or it could be that Alan Warms struck someone at Yahoo as a good GM for Yahoo News, as Kara suggests in her story (the head of Yahoo’s media group apparently connected with Warms at the D5 conference). But from what Kara says, it also sounds as though some of the other players in the space wanted too much money:
“Yahoo had looked at other better-known competitors in the space, such as the San Francisco-based Sphere… but those trendier (and more popular) startups apparently had too lofty valuations.”
Of course, it’s possible that some of them jacked the price up because they didn’t want to be acquired by Yahoo, but didn’t want to say no 
The bigger question, of course, is whether Yahoo plans to integrate meme-tracking into Yahoo News somehow, or just keep it as a sideline the way Netscape is with Propeller.
Jun 4th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
In contrast to the usual whining and moaning about how Google News and other similar aggregators are killing journalism and ruining the newspaper business, the World Association of Newspapers heard from someone who believes that Google and Yahoo can help to save newspapers, and perhaps even get teenagers to start reading them:
“After a five-minute delay Mike Smith, executive director of the Media Management Centre, part of America’s Northwestern University, took to the stage with some good news.
And it was radical news. Rather than website news aggregation services such as Yahoo News killing newspapers, they can actually save newspapers’ networks of foreign bureaux. Not only that, they can actually achieve the near impossible and prompt teens to start reading newspapers.”
Smith went on to talk about how the joint venture between Yahoo and a dozen large newspaper companies, including McClatchy (now owned by Knight Ridder) has helped papers cut costs and has saved more than a few foreign bureaus.
Mar 28th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Yahoo is teaming up with the McClatchy newspaper chain to offer international news coverage from the chain’s journalists, according to this press release, in a project to be called “Trusted Voices.”
Foreign correspondents based in select regions, including Iraq, the Middle East, China and Latin America, will provide everything from traditional news stories to exclusive blog reports, the release says. The project is expected to launch in the next couple of months, and one of the first initiatives will be the “Inside Iraq” blog written by native Iraqi staffers in McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau.
Media blogger Howard Owens has some thoughts on the arrangement here. In other news, McClatchy lost $280-million in the fourth quarter after taking a writedown on the sale of its largest paper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
