Yahoo Steers New Road Forward

Three years into the future, Yahoo Inc of Sunnyvale, California plans to be helming a company with the largest digital media content, search engine,  and communications business in the world. The three year roadmap of Yahoo under Carol Bartz was delivered by Chief Product Officer Blake Irving. The division between the projected goals of media and the concrete focus on products perhaps tells the tale.

Yahoo wants to be innovative, but has yet to master Twitter and Facebook. Yahoo News is trite and often misspelled, but Yahoo aims to keep people at its sites longer. Yahoo.com is stuffed with ads and Java code on loading, but it is strangely losing email customers to other vendors.Yahoo has middle ground presence in the domains business and its hosting offerings are not competitive among first tier web hosts, yet is splashes web hosting offers to bargoon domain sale buyers.

A fitting prescription to Yahoo’s vaulting ambitions might be Physician: heal thyself. The chief strengths that made Yahoo.com a leader, (remember sites by Homestead!) were its early adopter user base, frist to market search engine vibe, and broad free-Web appeal. Yahoo now suffers from Google-itis, the wish to be Google without harnessing its resources of business model. Yahoo is not aging well.

Yahoo intends to recapture search engine utility. Reality check to end users: When was the last time you searched Yahoo first? The SEO space is dominated by market leaders. Some might argue Google is already there, but Google has not entered the content space, and with the purchase of Associated Content, Yahoo has. The usual noise regarding Twitter and Facebook integration was heard.

Yes Google is global, a T-Rex of Internet monoliths. Yahoo was sort of the friendly Triceratops with the bristly head who was a herbivore but left a big footprint, as well. But Yahoo has suffered declining ad revenue and inroads of spam and email problems, and Gmail remains successful. Leaning on an Apple user base may also be a waste if the Windows 7 Phone takes off, because foremost on the “product runway” at Yahoo is Android apps.

But Yahoo doesn’t make or produce the consumer electronics it hypes. There are several other channels for consumer to go for that. With 17% market share, Yahoo’s web search engine is hardly the main attraction, now although it once was. The journalism of its home page leaves much to be desired, (part CNN and part OMG). Yahoo features are blogospheric in strength, with sports the best in a readability drilldown.

The only faintly new thing Yahoo is doing is fashioning a geo-specific Starbucks login page, (Which will still be heaps better than what Starbucks brews up).  Heading up Yahoo news this last weekend was how to save money at a Starbucks, an interesting marketing approach to a partner’s goods. But if Associated Content can groom its new model for Yahoo News, then supply-side content writers can enter the Yahoo journalism fray.

One spark at the end of a long tedious tunnel is Yahoo’s refreshed domain offer at $1.99 per dot-com name. Touted as a Small Business offering, the web hosting attached does approach the Godaddy similar pricing available at present. For hobby site makers and bloggers and one domain owners who never plan to go the third party development application route, this is a steal. But Godaddy’s Hosting Connection still rules those waves.

For domainers looking at the recent dot-com and renewal price markup, with a Yahoo $1.99 name their Paypal will say Yahoo! Although the renewal is $35, many Yahoo email users may prefer a short lightbulb-to-login web hosting and domaining click path. Full DNS control at Yahoo.com domains makes exporting to the hosting of your choice more smooth than before.

From the Crystal Ball: If Yahoo ever got their hands around the 99 cents domain coupon like Godaddy’s recent campaign, they would be looking at 5,000 new domain owners an hour looking for fresh content.Those are new email account holders, new Android holders looking to manage their websites or blog while in line for a latte. Starbucks is a partner, correct?

Developing those sites tutorials could be the pages that Yahoo wants ts readers to hang around at. And a limited time domain-establishing SEO content  package, with link wheeling advice and promotion tips, as well as material piped from Associated Content partners (on a select basis, of course) could bring Yahoo into the white-hot Internet domain development scene.

Boxing Hero Pacquiao Takes Yahoo Trophy

Filipino demos can’t get enough of boxing hero Manny Pacquiao. According to search engine Yahoo!, “Manny Pacquiao” was the most searched term in the Philippines for 2009, edging out the late democracy President Corazon Aquino who came in a close second.

According to search engine Yahoo!, “Manny Pacquiao” was the most searched term in the Philippines for 2009, edging out the late democracy Preident  Corazon Aquino who came in a close second. Domains and sites  like “www.boxinghero.com” make development for sports boxing a reliable source of traffic from demos like this.

According to Yahoo the Phillipines’s search results emerged from an estimated 150 million online searches this year for the Philippines alone.

Yahoo!, which has a search engine function,  released graphic data showing “Manny Pacquiao” garnering roughly 25 percent of all searches in the Philippines. This was slightly higher than the number of online queries for “Cory Aquino” which hit almost one-fourth of the total.

This was followed by queries for Francis Magalona, Ondoy, Dionisia Pacquiao, Shalani Soledad, Eraserheads, the University Athletic Association of the Philippines, Mar and Korina and the Philippine Basketball Association.

“What is unique to the Philippines is that the boundaries between entertainment, politics and sports intertwine simultaneously, reflective of Philippine culture,” Yahoo! said in an e-mailed reply to the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The Yahoo Phillipines search engine data list was led by commercial model Maricar Reyes, who was involved in a controversial sex video with suspended cosmetic surgeon Hayden Kho.

The online searches done by people who accessed the Internet from mobile devices such as mobile phones, however, had a slightly different flavor, evidence perhaps of the different demographics of mobile web users. (So perhaps dot-Mobi isn’t dead!!!!)

OMG, OMG.com got Yahoo’d

So how come nobody has trademarked OMG yet? Yahoo will probably try. Active in the domain sector (propping up a cheap domain selling but expensive to renew Yahoo Small Business franchise) the search engine/email utility/all purpose map platform and more company has been buying and selling space the past few months.

But can they develop worth a darn? Yahoo is  the buyer of OMG.com, which sold last week for $80,000, according to Domain Name Wire.

A well-known gossip site moniker, OMG.com shows those picture of starlets on red carpets in Hollywood and talks breathlessly about people you never knew existed. And now it belongs to …Yahoo.

Of course, Yahoo has a history with domain names too big for the ‘Hoo britches. Yahoo sold off contests.com in June for $380,000 after sitting on it for many years. Could Yahoo be the big domains player sleeper after all?

more at techCrunch

Yahoo and MSN Get in Bed

Searching for traffic in all the right places, Internet behemoths Yahoo and MSN have decided to pool resources and roll out a competitor to the famed Google titan of the search waves. Domainers looking to gain traffic must contentd with a new analytic powerhouse ruling the clicks online.

Under the 10-year deal, Yahoo.com and Bing.com will maintain their own branding but search results on Yahoo.com will say “powered by Bing.” Yahoo, in turn, will be responsible for attracting premium advertisers.

Microsoft will pay Yahoo 88% of the revenue it gains from searches on Yahoo’s sites. Microsoft will also have the rights to integrate Yahoo’s search technology into its own existing MSN hosted sites and platform portals. The deal is expected to close in early 2010.