Yahoo Brand Sites Would Be Better As a Tool For YPN Publishers
January 31st, 2007
Yahoo has announced the implementation of a new set of brand sites that are almost entirely built with the APIs of various Yahoo services like Flickr, Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! News, del.icio.us, and more.
The first site is a site for the Nintentdo Wii gaming system. Supposedly Yahoo is not doing these in partnership with the brands, but may do so at some point.
I think it’s a great idea that Yahoo! is looking to leverage their services and APIs in ways to create compelling sites and content. But as John Battelle points out, something doesn’t feel quite right about this implementation.
Regardless, I think a better strategy would be to use all of Yahoo’s various content services and make them available to YPN publishers. Make it extremely easy for both technical and non-technical web publishers to pull this same type of content, and in exchange that publisher has to use YPN to monetize the content. Therefore, if I’m a publisher running my own Nintentdo Wii site I can use this same content, and reward Yahoo for providing it by running their ads on it. Sure, they’d need some way to check or verify this, but I think it could be done.
It’s a service that Google could not provide to Adsense users, as they don’t own as much content or as many widely-used services as Yahoo. Why not leverage those strengths into helping win more volume from publishers?
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Entry Filed under: Ad Networks, Advertising, Publishing, Random, Yahoo
4 Comments Add your own
1. Sramana Mitra | January 31st, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Very recently, I wrote 4C: Yahoo’s Turnaround Formula, criticizing them for having haphazard offerings with no segmentation.
This announcement addresses some of my points, in that they are actually tying together various disjointed and haphazard properties around a particular brand, and creating an integrated experience.
I like it.
2. Greg G. | January 31st, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Most of this content is available to outside publishers via the Yahoo Developer Network; APIs for Flickr, News, Answers, etc enable just about anyone to create a site’s like these. Most of the APIs have restrictions that limit monetization to YPN, and all of the APIs have limits around 5000 calls per day that make it somewhat impractical to build a large scale service with their stuff. It would be nice to see Yahoo open this up a bit more, just as Google owns the search market, Yahoo can own the content market.
3. Pat McCarthy | January 31st, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Very true Greg. My suggestion would be like yours that they open it up, and that they make this obvious to YPN publishers by featuring it in the YPN interface and making it easy to do implementations of the API.
Now, I don’t know the costs associated with allowing API access, so it could be that it wouldn’t end up being profitable even through YPN monetization to really open up the API to more than 5,000 calls per day.
4. Greg G. | February 1st, 2007 at 7:09 am
Well, if the required YPN monetization, it would seem win-win on their end; it’s the same content as they are displaying on their own pages, with their ads, so from a cost of offering it perspective, things are taken care of. They only risk diluting the audience to their own properties, but I would think mass diversification with potential to drive back traffic to the mothership would be a better play.
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