Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is already tired of cynicism about the company, but understands that the business world still looks at Yahoo with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Yahoo introduced a new $100 million global ad campaign Tuesday in New York at the IAB's MIXX conference, centered on the marketing-friendly ideas of personalization and empowerment. Expect to see a blitz of Yahoo ads starting Monday emphasizing that "It's You" when it comes to finding what you want on the Internet, and especially at Yahoo.
Most of Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele's presentation, before those in town for Advertising Week and streamed live online, was constructed to emphasize that Yahoo cares about its users, with the reasonable presumption that advertisers will care about a company that can attract hundreds of millions of those users. Yahoo is already an Internet monster: the second largest property on the Web behind Google with 581 million visitors a month and 70 percent of the U.S. Internet population stopping by on a regular basis.
But Yahoo's campaign is really about more than that. It's also about making a break from the past vision of Yahoo as an out-of-control company that really didn't know what it wanted to be when it grew up.
This was clear in a question-and-answer session following Steele's presentation when Bartz alternatively blasted the "cynicism" that seems to follow Yahoo everywhere but acknowledged that the company has something to prove.
"Why are you cynical about us?" Bartz asked rhetorically in response to a question about whether too much emphasis is placed on the need for Yahoo to develop new strategies. "Why don't you get cynical about fricking Google? If you don't like us just leave us alone."
Of course, investors and the media are cynical about Yahoo because this is a company that presses the reset button on a regular basis. Over the past several years with CEOs like Terry Semel and Jerry Yang in charge, Yahoo has reinvented itself so many times that another CEO making another promise about another strategy tends to ring hollow.
Later in the press conference, Bartz softened her tone in response to a question about Yahoo's languishing stock price. "I think investors are like you guys (the media), saying 'let's wait and see.' We know it's our job to impress the press and investors, all of you are part of this world we live in."
Yahoo's stock (in red) has languished against rival Google and the broader Nasdaq market.
(Credit: Yahoo Finance)Still, this IS a different Yahoo. There is new blood throughout the top ranks of the company and they would prefer to not be judged on the dysfunction that was there when they arrived. Instead, they want to focus on the positives, such as Yahoo's immense audience, its advantage in the display advertising market, and its quirky sense of its own self.
The new campaign will try to highlight all of those strengths, reminding people that they can find nearly anything they want on Yahoo and interact with the huge number of people who have a Yahoo account. New search features discussed a few weeks back are also now open to all Yahoo visitors. "We want to show them what the new Yahoo is all about," Bartz said. Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of integrated consumer experiences, added that this emphasis on personalization is really a new product development strategy that is being presented by the "It's You" campaign.
Which, of course, brings it back to the question that set Bartz off. Yahoo seems to want it both ways: to be seen as an already strong business on its own merits, and to be seen as a company in the midst of reinvention.
Will it work? Ad campaigns are unlikely to drive huge traffic growth for a collection of Web sites that is already so big, but Yahoo wants to emphasize to both consumers and advertisers that it is a destination site. "There's not a major event in the world where we don't break every Internet record" for traffic, Bartz said, and for Yahoo to grow that can't change.
While Yahoo shores up its image, Bartz can focus on the more unpleasant task of deciding what needs to disappear at Yahoo to keep the cost side of the equation down. She declined to comment on reports about a possible sale of Zimbra, but said Yahoo is evaluating much of its business and will make decisions about what to sell and what to shut down.
One year ago Yahoo was an exhausted company, following the breakdown of talks with Microsoft over a possible merger and a very public fight with activist investor Carl Icahn. Bartz's arrival in January has brought more change, with the company's deal to outsource search to Microsoft and yet another reorganization.
"I think what happened with Yahoo is people put a cloud over its head, and the company kind of put a cloud over its head," Bartz said. At the same time, she feels that the majority of its users outside Silicon Valley or New York are delighted with the company's services and enjoy spending time on Yahoo.
This is part of what still makes Yahoo a difficult company to understand: if the media is too cynical about Yahoo needing to change, and users outside the digerati love the services, why did Yahoo revamp its home page and will now spend $100 million on consumer advertising to emphasize a "new" product development strategy?
Marketing agency Rosetta released a study Thursday that found Bill Me Later and PayPal are the most popular alternative payment options on the Web, capturing 26 percent and 25 percent market share, respectively. Google Checkout increased its share by just 1 percent in 2008 commanding just 11 percent of the market.
Rosetta also found that 37 percent of the top 100 major retailers on the Web employ alternative payment options like those offered from PayPal and Bill Me Later, but just 7 percent of those retailers offer all three services.
iPhone developer Smule announced Thursday that it has secured $3.9 million of funding in a round that was led by Granite Ventures. According to the company, its apps have been downloaded by more than 1 million users and due to that success, it was able to raise the capital. It plans to use its funding to further invest in apps for the iPhone and other mobile devices.
Mixx, a Digg-like service "for the mainstream," launched a new homepage Thursday called YourMixx and will allow users to decide whether they want the company's new page to be their start page or their individual notifications page. The company also announced that users who write polls that are selected for publication on the site will be rewarded with "Karma and props." The Mixx user who has the most polls published will be given a Pollster badge to add to their profile page.
Enterprise microblogging service Yammer will announce a hosted version of its software Thursday that can be installed inside a corporate firewall, TechCrunch is reporting. Yammer customers will be able to switch from the SaaS version of the software to the hosted service and it plans to transfer network information between both iterations, the report claims. Yammer plans to charge $12 per seat per year.
Zoho announced on Wednesday that in light of Google suspending Google Notebook, it has enhanced its own service, Zoho Notebook.
According to the company, it has added a Google Notebook import function, which allows users to import all their Google Notebooks into Zoho's software. The company also added the ability to link between notebooks, record audio and video, and chat with other Zoho users through a new instant-messaging application built into the software. The updated Zoho Notebook is available now.
Mixx, a Digg-like social site that caters to a more "mainstream" audience, has inked a deal with online advertising agency Federated Media to handle all its advertising endeavors. Mixx now joins Federated Media's group of content sites that employ the company to connect them with advertisers.
Federated Media's executives said they will work closely with Mixx representatives to develop "conversational marketing executions" that will cater to Fortune 500 brands. Advertising rates have yet to be determined.
OneSeason.com, a company that offers virtual goods and a gaming platform for sports enthusiasts, announced that it has secured $3.5 million in a Series A round of financing that was led by Charles River Ventures. The company's founder, Mike Sroka, said he will use the funding to build out the site's virtual-goods marketplace and enhance features in its social-gaming network.
Use of Twitter in the United Kingdom has increased tenfold year-over-year, according to a report from market research firm Hitwise. According to the report, "Twitter ranked as the 291st most visited Web site in the U.K., up from a ranking of 2,953 (in 2007), for the week ending January 19, 2008. U.K. Internet traffic to the Web site has increased by 974 percent over this period." Hitwise also said Twitter is still growing at a rapid rate, which is partly due to British celebrities publicly joining the site.
Social network Bebo on Thursday announced that it has partnered with Motionbox, a service for sharing personal videos, to bring video-publishing tools to Bebo's users. Those who wish to use the Motionbox platform on Bebo will have access to its basic membership, which includes online-editing tools and secure storage. Bebo users who want to post high-definition videos will need to sign up for Motionbox's subscription service and pay $29.95 per year.
StumbleUpon, an online discovery site that competes with Digg, Mixx, and Reddit, said Tuesday it has expanded its partner program to include Funny Or Die, Atom, Scientific American, and 5min.com.
StumbleUpon launched its partner program this fall with HowStuffWorks, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The Huffington Post. According to StumbleUpon, its partner program tools help sites' users find articles, photos, and videos indexed by StumbleUpon without heading to StumbleUpon's site, downloading its toolbar, or registering for an account.
StumbleUpon said its feature offer more exposure for its partner sites' best content and, in turn, increase the appeal of StumbleUpon and its discovery engine.
"StumbleUpon is fortunate to able to partner with these premier publishers to expose Stumbling on the Web to an even larger audience," Michael Buhr, general manager of StumbleUpon, said in a statement.
Whether adding a handful of partner sites will yield better results for StumbleUpon remains to be seen. But as the company's executives said when the program kicked off, they hope to open it up to all publishers soon.
An earlier version of this blog incorrectly stated some of Mixx's content partnerships.
Mixx, a social-news site that Webware covered last month, is poised to launch its public beta on Tuesday, along with the first of a number of content partnerships with news outlets.
The site has been in an invitation-only private beta for some time now, and it is attempting to rise above the crowded niche of social news by providing a community-focused service and more ways to customize the news to fit your own interests and preferences.
Mixx differs from social-news leaders like Digg in that instead of providing a central list of news links, it offers a more tweakable experience, from filtering content by category to allowing users to view their local news by ZIP code.
Upon registering, users are asked to pick and choose the kinds of headlines they'd like to see; if you don't want celebrity gossip or Steve Jobs gossip, you won't get it. Additionally, Mixx enables users to create groups for their news consumption preferences, which would have been more newsworthy if Digg hadn't started doing the same thing last month; the Mixx team, however, has pointed out that Mixx news groups can be privatized.
But Mixx has gained buzz not only for its promise of a more customizable social-news experience but also because of the resumes behind it. Mixx founder and CEO Chris McGill is the former head of strategy at USA Today and former general manager of Yahoo News, and several other members of the Mixx team are AOL veterans.
Like video start-up Next New Networks, which has a roster packed with MTV Networks alums, Mixx is a new company that's riding the tide of old-company credentials. On the downside, some start-up enthusiasts will probably snub their noses at Mixx because "big media doesn't get it."
But on the upside, impressive resumes mean good connections, which is probably why Mixx has been able to ink content deals with a number of news outlets: USA Today, Reuters, The Weather Channel, and UClick.
There's no specific model for these content partnerships, and Mixx representatives have stressed that they may include hosted content (text, images and video) on the Mixx.com domain, submit-to-Mixx buttons on partners' sites, or search optimization--so it's all more than a little bit amorphous. But we'll be seeing the first of these roll out over the course of the month.
Mixx is an upcoming social news service. If you're familiar with Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, Mixx takes a little bit from all three to provide a really solid framework for discovering and popularizing Web content.
Much like Digg, Mixx has a front page with user-submitted stories that have been voted up from an upcoming pool. Where Mixx strays (in a good way) from Digg and others is user customization. When signing up with the service, you pick categories and topics you're interested in. From then on, each and every time you check the service, the front page has the top five stories from each of these categories, giving you a quick overview of what's hot on the site. You can actually accomplish the same thing with Digg right now by setting up RSS feeds from each of the topics into a service like Netvibes, or checking out the Digg page on Original Signal, but it's really nice to have this built in.
So what makes this service promising? It's really just a mish-mash of ideas that work well together. Things like a local news section (based on ZIP code), and groups for users to share content with one another give it a social twist that up until last night, Digg didn't really have. So now that it does, what would make a user of other social news services bother making the switch? For one thing, the UI is extremely simplistic and intuitive. Tags are also a really enjoyable way to browse through content--and like Delicious--give submitters a little more control of how their story will show up in site searches, and how other users can find it.
There are a few things that need work though. For one thing, the site is a little sluggish. It's also missing some tools to help you submit content to the site, like a "Mixx This" bookmark that you can add to your browser toolbar, or a shortcut button to add to blogs and Web sites. The comment system is also a little crippled, with no threading, only "@user" replies that note whose comment you're responding to. While I don't think Mixx will ever overtake some of currently popular social news services out there, it could easily build up its own community of loyal users who are seeking more group-oriented bookmarking, and a quick way to eyeball different content genres at once.
We've got 50 invites to give away, so if you're looking to give Mixx a spin (sorry), there's a sign-up form and more shots of the service after the break.
Update: All the invites have been given away. If you missed out, you can still sign-up on Mixx's front page.
See popular stories from each section, not just the front page with Mixx.
(Credit: CNET Networks)... Read more
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