Yahoo announced yesterday that it will be scaling back its efforts to generate original content and will shift to content generated by others, particularly users: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/technology/02yahoo.html. This is the latest step in the evolution of the web and illustrates a number of key rules that are generally applicable across businesses:
- Stick to what you know. Yahoo is terrific at aggregating audiences and enabling navigation through content. Trying to create new a content brand, i.e., competing with players such as Disney, ESPN, CBS News, etc., but leveraging its strengths to drive audience to its content is a tough challenge, especially when the web makes access to any and all content so easy.
- Don’t compete with your customers unless you’re going to win. Becoming a content provider makes you less attractive to other content providers. While that discussion is pushed to the end of the article and disclaimed by Yahoo, I think that it must have been a larger influence than Yahoo was willing to admit.
And finally, we seem to look at each new medium as if it were just a variation on the old one: TV is radio with pictures – early TV shows were studio shows of people clustered around a microphone. The web is interactive TV – let’s create TV programming for the web. Oops, maybe user-generated content is the key.
Let’s see where the web goes next.
