Om Malik has crafted a nice piece on “How Yahoo got its Mojo Back“, and how it may once again be cool to do that daft Yodel!
By buying Flickr earlier this month and OddPost last year, Yahoo has bought into the open-standards, web services business model, something which has gotten it much love from the bloggers who apparently care too much about this type of stuff. Adding RSS and blogs to My Yahoo, makes them cooler than the other two – MSN and Google. In an effort to best Google, the company has upped its free email storage to one gigabyte. Yahoo offered desktop search tool, just like Google. It is launching a blogging-meets-social networking tool, Yahoo 360. I have not seen it but count on blogsphere love for it. The company also announced today that it will search creative commons content. What that means is really nothing for many of the mom-and-pops don’t care about license information etc. But it will get boing-boinged and create the right karma for the company. If you look at all these features, it is not clear that if any one of these will bring any major dollars into the company. It will show to the chattering classes that Yahoo is on the right track. And is embracing new technologies etc. That’s until something new comes along.
I have to agree with Om, that Yahoo is cool again, but only because they’ve been playing catchup with Google, and for now have edged out in front. All the services that Yahoo has been deploying and purchasing lately aren’t going to do much for them from a financial point of view, well not right now anyway. After all, it jokingly mentioned by one of the Flickr guys that, because of the Yahoo purchase they could finally make payroll. A cool service Flickr may be, but it’s not one that will fill the coffers for Yahoo. But then again, this isn’t about the money! It’s about making Yahoo cool again! Right?
Making Yahoo cool again, will take a lot more than just wining the Blogosphere over to it’s side. After all, while loud, boisterous and out-spoken, the blogosphere remains a small percentage of internet usage and users. What Yahoo needs to do to be cool again is to win over the average Joe! They must win over my Grandmother, the teenager who wants to stick it to Microsoft and had Firefox as his browser which makes Google his default search engine.
After reading Oms article I found myself trying to recall the last time one of my customers even mentioned “Yahoo” to me. In their never ending quest for SEO, they’re bottom line, almost universally has been, “Where do I place on Google?”. “How do I get a higher rank on Google?”, “Can I make Google crawl my site more often?”, these are the type of question I hear almost daily. It’s almost never “Where do I place on Yahoo?”.
My customers obsession with Google is, well, it’s just that and obsession. It’s not my fault! I do try to educate them as to the value of promoting their sites with other search services, but they all just want the Google love! Why is that? Could it be linked to the fact that the Yahoo yodel terrorized us for so long? Probably, but it’s more likely because Google has received so much media coverage in recent times, and continues to do so. Every move that Google makes, and doesn’t make, is poke prodded and analyzed my the media until nothing but a former shadow if itself remains.
But this is an opportunity for Yahoo. Not just to play catch-up, which it has done well, but to place itself way out ahead, without all the media attention, and then drop an advertising and media bomb on us all. Then we’ll see the media (and the coolness) shift, if it was apparent that Google had to play catch up to stay in the game.
