Earth to Yahoo
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | October 11, 2006 | Share This
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Yahoo! got slammed today by the New York Times, in the wake of excitement over Google/YouTube. Pointing out that Y! has failed to close numerous deals, the NY Times says, “From video programming to social networking –areas of interest to users and advertisers alike — the company is losing its initiative.” The NY Times blames Y!’s troubles on their predicament as a media company competing in a search market. Indeed, Yahoo! draws competitors as far ranging as CNN, ESPN, Microsoft, Myspace, and of course Google.
Perhaps over-extension can explain why search analysts seem to be losing interest in Yahoo! Yesterday, their Weather Report got almost no coverage, despite a huge announcement on the Yahoo! blog. Or perhaps search marketers are bored with waiting for Yahoo! to take risks. The NY Times suggests that internal bickering has slowed development to a point of stagnation, frustrating potential M&A, straining employee relations and clogging internal operations.
In Yahoo!’s defense, they have launched a number of interesting projects that received a fair amount of coverage in the news. Hack Day, for example, was highly successful, and their open source Mail beta seems to have everyone buzzing. Their promotional ad campaign kicked off recently with ads about dead dogs and butt-touching– that’s interesting, right? And then of course, there’s the Mexican Temple project, aka “Time Capsule“. Yahoo plans to beam a digitized record of society into outer space from the top of a Toltec pyramid in Teotihuacan, Mexico, while simultaneously projecting the record on the side of the pyramid…
…Um, did I say “interesting”? I meant, Yahoo’s new projects are completely BIZARRE. From their weirdly humored ads to the alien laser project, Yahoo! seems less ‘out of commission’ and more ‘out of touch’. To add to the weirdness, Y! appears to be conducting a secret sabotage of Google via its Messenger service. Last week Search Engine Watch reported a clickfraud issue with Google Adsense from Messenger, and now the Register reports that Messenger is blocking YouTube URLs.
It seems like Yahoo!’s biggest problem isn’t a lack of risky undertakings, it’s their poor expenditure decisions. Instead of hiring Beck to play Hack Day and building lasers to shoot into space, Yahoo! should be focusing on pushing Panama out the door for its scheduled release date. And if they ARE going to spend money on promotional stunts like the Time Capsule, they could invest in a little research into the project before releasing it to the press. Today Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History informed Yahoo! that the exposure of a laser and the technical setup of their Time Capsule would cause irreparable damage to the ancient ruins. Needless to say, Yahoo! is yet to announce a new location for the ceremony.
Topics: SEM: Paid Search, Search: News, Yahoo! |
Excellent post, I agree completely.
Up north of the border Yahoo! has shut down its search product in English Canada to new advertisers with absolutely no explanation as to why, nor an estimated date it will be opened back up. Is it Panama related, who knows?
The decisions Yahoo! has been recently making are mindblowing - they are actually turning down revenue because they haven’t gotten their act together internally.
And the pyramid laser idea? Do they miss the dot-com boom that much at HQ?
how things