Jason Calacanis goes crazy this morning… but I wonder if he realizes the irony of his attack on YHOO.
First, his beef:
Yahoo made a huge critical blunder today: they decided to compete with their customers. Today they launched a content site called Shine dedicated to women. It looks really slick, and they make a point of talking about all the great editors they have working on it from Jane and the Wall Street Journal.
Anyway, back to Shine: wow, really dumb idea on Yahoo part. I would kill myself if I was running the publisher network right now. Can you imagine what it would be like to go to WSJ, Jane, iVillage, Glam, or Sugar publishing and try and get them to support Yahoo services?
- Yahoo sale person: “Hello, I from Yahoo. We would like you to use Yahoo Publisher Network and share ad revenue with you”
- Glam/Sugar/Jane/publisher “oh, really? That’s great! I hope you take the profits and put them into your competing content site that will drink our milkshake!”
- Yahoo sale person: ” You bet! We will drink it up…. we will drink your milkshake.”
When Microsoft takes over Yahoo this will create even more problems. MSN/Live is trying to compete with Google AdSense and Yahoo’s blunder is going to feed right into Google’s “we won’t compete with publishers” position.
If I was running a women’s site today I would make a point of puling everything I have off of Yahoo and building a voting block of women’s sites to do the same. If Yahoo wants to go “winner take all” that’s their right, but the niche content sites should stand up for themselves and vote with their partnership dollars for a true partner who doesn’t run off with your business in the night.
Someone please explain to me why they would do something so dumb right now. Rafat Ali? Kara Swisher? Mike Arrington? Om Malik? Henry Blodget? Someone please clue me in… because this seems so dumb I can’t understand it.
Second, this is hypocritical.
Let me explain. Yahoo! did this for the same reason Mahalo.com started off creating pages linking out to 7 websites per a given topic… and then after a while decided to create full articles on said topics.
Pretty much like this vs. this.
Content is king. Having a page with links out (gee, sort of like YHOO and Mahalo 1.0) is somewhat limiting… but having a page with actual content is slightly more valuable. Jason, you of all people should know this.
I appreciate the nuance that Yahoo! has an ad network for publishers, but that is no Google network. In fact, this is no different Google.com competing with Google’s network for ad revenue (if a client’s ad budget is tapped, it’s tapped, after all).
To boot: Yahoo can leverage Shine to get more ad dollars for themselves and for their publisher partners.
I do agree that Yahoo!’s excessive hail marries are starting to seem desperate, but this move in of itself is not all that dumb.
Disclosure: long YHOO stock… but trust me, no one enjoys criticizing YHOO more than I do.
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