Yahoo! recently announced a new contest and Yahoo! Green site to help people have an impact on living a greener life. Read the announcement for all the details, but the short summary is that they have created a contest that asks users to ask green questions on Yahoo! Answers, take a pledge on different ways you can help live a greener life, and search for some green things on Yahoo’s OneSearch. The city that has the most people participating will win a fleet of hybrid taxis and each consumer who participates gets a free CFL bulb out of it.
Besides it being a cool cause, this is a great example of how Yahoo! can leverage their properties, tools, and content to build interesting campaigns and websites. They’ve built out an educational contest and site that helps people learn, is fun to use, and leverages their other products and platforms like Answers and OneSearch. It also provides some incentive for consumers to compete in a contest, and there is a benefit to the city that wins.
Don’t think this is purely altruistic though, as I did notice targeted Ford Hybrid advertising on the site. Hey, Yahoo! is a capitalistic company right?
It brings me back to a post I made in January about Yahoo! using their tools and content to help publishers build stronger sites. There are now quite a few examples of sites Yahoo! has built in this manner such as the Green site, Wii Brand Site, and One.org.
As a publisher, I want those abilities to help build out content sites. I want to pull relevant content from Yahoo! Video, Flickr photos, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups, and more. In exchange for all the free content and tools I’ll let Yahoo! show ads on my sites. Sounds fair to me!
Disclosure: The company I work for recently agreed to be acquired by Yahoo!