In the span of two days this week, Yahoo announced six separate initiatives all socially media focused.
First, Yahoo! will leverage the Associated Content platform they acquired for $100 million back in May and open their doors even wider to outside contributors with the launch of the “Yahoo! Contributor Network.” Yahoo! leveraged its expertise in aggregating and featuring the writings of journalists from around the world to become the Internet’s largest provider of news. Yahoo! now joins a growing roster of Websites, led by The Huffington Post and Demand Media, which aggregate user-generated content to drive traffic, advertising impressions, and revenue. Yahoo will start with Associated Content’s roster of over 400,000 writers, photographers and videographers, and they will aggressively add new contributors looking to “share their knowledge and passion with hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” and “earn money.” The win-win-win scenario that has proven out is that contributors get access to a large platform to feature their content (and possibly money), Yahoo! will get page views and cheaper content, and the Yahoo! audience gets a broader depth of content to choose from. Yahoo! expects to post more than 2,000 stories a day from the new site. Yahoo! and online news in general is poised to continue to benefit from the changing behavior of how people consume news.
In the second move, Yahoo! launched two games (Mafia Wars and Fishville) from Zynga, the dominant developer of social games on the Facebook platform. The partnership was originally reported in May, as Zynga was working through its relationship with Facebook. The games are initially part of Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Games, and the Y! Toolbar. Assuming this first leg of the roll out works out, Zynga will eventually integrate its largest properties FarmVille and Texas Hold ‘Em.
The third initiative announced is their introduction of Local Offers, a new local deals site where Yahoo! will leverage the deals from many of the leading online and offline deal providers to build a massive database of local offerings. Local Offers is now in limited beta in the U.S., with 16 launch partners including Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, Coupons.com, and Valpak, with more to follow as the new platform eventually opens up to all deal providers.
Yahoo also announced a new version of Yahoo! Messenger that will include gaming, status update capabilities, as well as view updates across social networks. Twitter is also being integrated across a myriad of Yahoo’s properties (Homepage, Messenger, Mail and Pulse). And finally, Yahoo announced local search enhancements through “quick apps” that will enable better search for local merchants, as well as integration with tools like a reservation feature on search thru OpenTable.
We are very impressed by the quantity and quality of these social initiatives and think that Yahoo! is extraordinarily well positioned to leverage the new social Web given the company’s tremendous global scale.
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