Yahoo’s New Approach

16Mar09

Yesterday’s New York Times had a great article about Yahoo’s push for original web content.

Yahoo was an early pioneer for web video back in the heady days a few years ago when anything more complicated than Flash was something of a novelty. Hard to believe how quickly we’ve advanced.

So Yahoo’s first shows didn’t work out quite as well as they had hoped. They modeled their plan on what already worked: traditional television. They tried to port that model to the web with lengthy and expensive talk shows and sitcoms. You can’t blame them for this; they were venturing into uncharted wilderness. But it didn’t work.

The Yahoo team created a variety of high quality, TV-like productions that simply didn’t have enough of an audience. The article quotes Yahoo’s head of entertainment, who acknowledged that their early shows “didn’t target any existing need.”

They did something that has been done before.

But, as the last few years have shown, web video has its own paradigm. It succeeds not in spite of its differences from traditional TV but because of them. Shorter form, more interactive content–whether it’s lonelygirl15 or Dr. Horrible or Prom Queen–rules the web.

So Yahoo is giving it another go.

Their new series won’t be anything like TV. They won’t reach as large an audience as TV. They won’t need to.

But, at least in the development stage, Yahoo’s new shows won’t be exactly like other web shows either. Most creators, amateur and professional, make whatever they feel like making, send it out there, promote it, and hope to find an audience. An “if you build it, they will come” sort of mentality. Sometimes it works spectacularly, but most of the time not so much. But Yahoo has a resource most video creators don’t have: a massive collection of data about user preferences and interests. It is, after all, a search engine, and like any good company it knows what its customers want.

So instead of throwing series at a dart board and hoping they stick, Yahoo’s going to skip that step and just give their already huge audience what they like.

It makes a lot of sense, at least in theory. We’ll see how it turns out. Their first new series, “Spotlight to Nightlight,” will showcase celebrities who are new to motherhood, and how their lives have changed. Yahoo’s team strongly believes that this series will appeal to their female userbase; State Farm is sponsoring it, just as confident that a female audience will love it.

We’re looking forward to the series, set to debut later this year. Yahoo’s new, focused approach definitely sounds promising, and we hope it bears out.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment