Can Yahoo do content?

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Braun has managed to capture headlines through a string of high-profile hires, such as Neil Budde, founding editor of The Wall Street Journal Online. Braun also brought in former CBS Television Interactive Ventures executive David Katz, former AOL Broadband exec Shawn Hardin and ex-MSN video guru Scott Moore. Under Braun's watch, Yahoo has also launched smaller original projects like the multimedia news site "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone."

But for all the headlines, reader traffic is the real currency in the online world, because marketers use those numbers to sell ads at higher rates. And that's where Braun has come up short.

As head of the Media Group, Braun runs all creative and business aspects of Yahoo's music, games, movies, television, entertainment, finance, news, weather, sports, health, education and children's sites.

At Yahoo Finance, one of the network's more important moneymakers, page views fell from more than 800 million in January 2005 to just a tick above 500 million in January of this year. That comes as a surprise to some Yahoo watchers because the company hired several financial columnists in October, including Ben Stein, to write original material for the site.

Yahoo Games, still the most popular gaming site in the category, lost 2 million unique visitors in the same January-to-January period and had 21 million unique visitors last month. Page views declined more dramatically--from about 1.3 billion to about 800 million, falling behind AOL Games and EA Online, according to ComScore.

Growth was slow at Yahoo News, despite original content additions and a major technology upgrade that included RSS support. Yahoo added features from TV war journalist Kevin Sites, The Huffington Post, Gawker Media and Richard Bangs, an "extreme travel" journalist. The number of Yahoo News visitors grew only 2 percent from January 2005 to last month.

Anke Audenaert, Yahoo's vice president of research, points to Yahoo Music, News and Sports as success stories for the media group. But the "overall story is good," too, Audenaert said.

Since its launch in January 2005, Yahoo Music, for example, led traffic among music services, including the No. 2 AOL Music and No. 3 iTunes software. The service also introduced original content from emerging musicians that includes interviews and performance video clips.

Audenaert said boosting user engagement is important at Yahoo and by that measure, the company has also succeeded. On a recent earnings call, Yahoo said it increased the average number of properties consumed by users by almost 24 percent in the last year.

For all that success, however, there is that niggling question about original content. For Yahoo, "nothing has really popped creatively," said Mitch Oscar, executive vice president of Carat Digital, an advertising agency. "Yahoo hired a marquee name, and like with any marquee name, you hope he can adapt to the culture and innovate. But generally, we haven't seen anything innovative there yet."

Slow on the deals
Yahoo optioned one of Braun's pet projects from his ABC days. Called "The Runner," the project is essentially a spy-on-the-run reality show expected to cost the company $10 million to produce. But after two years in production, "The Runner" is "in development and it hasn't been green-lit," Yahoo's Anklesarria said.

[pentium4forever]

Lloyd Braun -- Serenity now.....sanity later!

Lloyd Braun character is funny on the Seinfeld sitcom.

[jamms]

Yahoo shot itself in the foot.

I was a yahoo fan until i switched to mac and discovered that most of yahoo's services are not compatable cross platform. I'm not talking about messenger or other stand alone apps, I'm talking about the website. If yahoo wants to build a website that only runs of windows, fine.. but don't get upset when people who move to another platform leave. Bottom line is you can get the exact same information and content at many other places on the web, and yahoo is not necessary.

[BakedPotato]

Yahoo: The Clock's Ticking

As directories and search engines, Yahoo and Google have excelled at organizing the web and helping individuals seek, find and access the things that uniquely matter to them.

Yet to take a position of creating original content and assuming it will successfully appeal to a wide enough audience is a notion that runs counter to that which brought those powerhouses such relevance and application.

If Yahoo is good at anything, it?s making it easy for people to get what they want when they want it. Back in the early days of the web, it simply took two guys in their dorm room to imagine and implement a strategy that continues to work today.

Perhaps it?s time to take a lesson from Apple who came to realize that straying too far from the shore and bringing in the big guns can spell ruination when the idea that put them there in the first place became lost.

Its time that Yahoo recognizes their true value and opportunity; simplify the experience for individuals to gain access to those who are willing to pay for the relationship, and let the content evolve from those who have the passion, talent and perserverence to rise to the top.

The clocks ticking?.

Gary Baker
President
Clipblast.com

[Robert Franco]

Message has been deleted.

[boymeyers]

AOL News As Well!

Your comscore data is missing a key player in online News---AOL, which is always ranked near Yahoo, MSN and CNN.

It seems to me Yahoo is trying to do what AOL content has done for years, original top notch programming.