Yahoo: what to do with all those eyeballs

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Yahoo: what to do with all those eyeballs

Posted by Mathew @ 3:00 pm on July 16 2008 | |

My friend Om Malik has an interesting post about Yahoo — and not about the interminable Yahoo vs. Microsoft-plus-Carl-Icahn takeover, which has become the beast that refuses to die, but about the kind of thing Yahoo should arguably have been focusing on instead of trying to compete with Google on search. As he describes it, one of the blog posts at Web Worker Daily got a spot on Yahoo’s home page, and then got voted up by users of Yahoo Buzz, a Digg-style feature. As Om says:

In a few hours, the story … was viewed over 200,000 times and attracted over 350 comments. Now that’s a lot of traffic — but more importantly, a gigantic amount of engagement displayed by Yahoo visitors. The traffic sent our way by Yahoo was many times the traffic we get from, say, Digg or StumbleUpon.

As Om notes, it’s not so much the sheer volume of traffic that is impressive, but the engagement of the audience. Even during the biggest Digg storm or Stumbleupon flood I’ve ever experienced, I’ve never gotten more than a handful of comments. As beaten-down as it is, Yahoo still gets a ton of traffic — but Om is right that it needs to find better ways of taking advantage of and leveraging that traffic, instead of just trying to go head-to-head with Google. Should it sell off its search arm to Microsoft? Perhaps. At least then it could concentrate on what makes it different from Google, instead of trying to duplicate it.

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Mathew posted this article under Yahoo on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 3:00 pm. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, and you can also view Technorati Linkbacks or check for other responses using YackTrack.

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Comments for “Yahoo: what to do with all those eyeballs”

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Scott Kinoshita 1 month ago 1 point
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This sounds familiar to a discussion I've heard on Drunk Duck, a web comics hosting site (www.drunkduck.com) where the thing that was really repeated was "I love the DD community". So correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like Yahoo's strength is in its community as well, and that's what they should be focusing on.

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http://www.rgdirect.com

mathewi 1 month ago 1 point
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Yes, I think you're right Scott -- which reminds me of my earlier post about Umair Haque and how much of what people do with new media isn't user-generated content by user-generated "context," which I think suggests community.

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34 /people/mathewi/ /people/mathewi/following/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work 504597536 mathewi mathewingram

Tim Leung 1 month ago 1 point
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I like the new perspective and the approach that Om and you are making in terms of the direction and vision of Yahoo. It makes a lot of sense.

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http://www.timleung.com