What Yahoo Needs To Do With Associated Content
Matt Heist is CEO of High Gear Media, a vertical publishing company that focuses on automotive content from professional writers and enthusiasts. Prior to joining High Gear Media, Heist worked at Sidestep.com, and before that, at Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO).
Yahoo moved a significant piece on the online-content chessboard with its acquisition of Associated Content. That gives Yahoo access to a robust content submission platform in addition to Associated
What about content licensing deals? This could be a particularly lucrative area for content publishers, perhaps more so than the struggle of selling ads via CPM. However, I would wager content licensing only applies to brands like AOL or proper premium brands with a legacy.
excellent post — very insightful.
Editorial oversight is a must. There are several ProAm outfits out there that are ruining their brands with content that varies from excellent to pitiful. But as any economist will tell you, bad money drives out good money. Any ProAm that thinks they can get along with crap will lose their credibility and will lose the good writers who bring in and give credibility to their outlet. When that happens, is is kaput.
I couldn’t agree more on the platform piece. We’ve been hearing of web 3.0 and semantic web for as long as web 2.0 has been around. It is the missing link that will allow a web 3.0 platform to drive content for different verticals from one common code base. The pro-am content alone won’t cut it. Just look at the facebook page on OpenGraph.
This will only be possible by moving away from the SQL relational DB, and adopting object hibernation and such technologies that allow the data models to flex as is required by the content.
Anyway, nice article.
Matt – your background in the space affords you a great perspective to understand the challenges and opportunities that are in store for Yahoo! with the Associated Content acquisition. While I’ve been tweeting, emailing and discussing the implications for this since the speculation began months ago, I think you hit all of the proverbial nails on the heads. They can utilize this in a variety of ways – and I do like the ideas of syndication (since that generates revenue and can be accompanied by an ad program).
At the end of the day, they need to think about their business strategy in a holistic manner and then separate the pieces to see how they’ll work individually as well. The wild card is indeed the competitive nature of the environment from the mainsteam media players, newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc and then the head-to-head battle with AOL/Demand Media.
One thing is certain – interesting times ahead! We’re excited though, as it creates new opportunities to help website publishers of all sizes monetize their offerings through Cursor Marketing, AdBull and other forms of cursor ads … in fact, we’ve just seen our beta offering surpass the results of both in-text and contextual/PPC ad programs (for more info on the stats, http://blog.cursormarketing.com ).
As Sam said in the above comment, “excellent post — very insightful.”
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High GEar Media is SMART! They have all kinds of incentives for their writers. In fact I have submitted a handful of article to them in the past and these articles were published on one of their various web properties.
They offer contests and prizes and drawings to those who submit articles….cool stuff like an IPAD!
They understand that the internet and web are built on content.
This Content Farm, (associated yahoo content) already has some unhappy writers going into this thing. Yahoo has imposed a New Rule to get rid of and keep out freelancers with their, “3 Strikes and Your Account is Out” Rule. Basically anytime it wants to get rid of some one they tell the writer they were warned 3 times about mispelling a word and they close your account without any notice. Most of these people had no prior notice of being struck out twice already.