How Will Yahoo "Monetize" Their Social Networks? 74
Thomas Hawk writes "One of the most interesting things to come out of Yahoo's earnings call with analysts yesterday was a statement by Yahoo's COO, Daniel L. Rosenweig on Yahoo's plans to 'monetize' their various social network properties. Flickr was mentioned five times on the conference call and their de.lic.io.us property was as well, after neither were mentioned in last quarter's call. Rosenweig characterized these services as being largely unmonetized and talked about leveraging these "assets" and targeting and profiling a large growing registered audience base. It will be interesting to see how some of Yahoo's popular web properties change through the monetization process."
well they could (Score:5, Funny)
Yahoo closes the circle (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't worry about Yahoos attempt to make money with flickr and del.icio.us and whether it might ruin those sites or not. The social network idea matches very nicely with what Yahoo has done in the past to make money, so they won't have to force those sites into another concept.
When Yahoo first appeared it was a bookmark list edited by one human. Search engine weren't as good as today and a directory like Yahoo often was much more useful. This changed when the web grew so fast that that no company could hope to keep up, resulting in Yahoo charging for faster integration into their index and the index becoming out of date very fast.
One attempt to improve the situation was to increase the number of contributers with the OpenDirectory, but even these where overwhelmed and today they cannot even handle the spam that is created non stop in dmoz, let alone keep pace with the web.
So we became dependent more on search engines than humans to find what we are looking for, fortunately for all of us Google proved to be very useful. But even Google has it's single point of failure, the one and only ranking algorithm. And although it's not trivial to cheat, the fact that Google reduces the web to basically the first ten entries on the first page leads to the same situation as with Yahoo and dmoz before: The web is not covered properly.
Enter social networks. Del.icio.us is like a dmoz where every user is a contributer. And nobody decides what is on top, it's pure statistics, much harder to cheat when hundreds of thousands of users are involved. With a limited amount of information sources you can easily manipulate an election, but the web provides a much larger base for building you own opinion, and it usually shows.
But what's really great about social networks is that the effort to contribute is so small. Extending dmoz is work, saving an URL at del.icio.us is something you primarily do for yourself, so we don't have to expect that the project will fail once the first movers are burned out. Given the ever increasing amount of information and the lack of progress in AI to sort through all this for us, we will become more and more dependent on others to filter for us. Information has become basically free, but finding the right information has become a challenge simply due to the sheer amount.
And here Yahoo closes the loop. The will never beat Google as a pure search engine, but maybe they can build the third generation of directories with their social network sites and continue to make money the way they always have: If you have the eye balls, enough people will buy something extra. And we will once again see Yahoo as the most efficient way to find information, because it is driven by humans.
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1. Produce a usable service with limited-to-no advertising.
2. Gain a large audience through any means required, including bundling Yahoo Toolbars in almost malicious, spyware fashions.
3. Slam it full of ads and quickly make a big chunk of change from the advertising.
4. Revoke features when the users abandon the service due to the obscene number of ads.
5. Reintroduce the feature in after a period of time and start at 1.
The only difference with Flickr and Del.icio.us is that they skipped steps 1
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Or am I missing something?
D
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Ask Pinocchio.
Re:Yahoo closes the circle (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo's social properties give them a huge advantage over Google if they chose to leverage them for something other than advertising. Integrating that social data into search could give them a pretty big edge that Google can't easily match.
I think the blurb summed it up (Score:5, Informative)
Someone please remind me again why we give a shit about yahoo (apart from email)? They've got to be the most craptastic set of services on the entire internet.
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Ugh. I had just managed to forget about that. The minute they take away the option to use the old yahoo mail, is the minute I permanantly switching over to gmail.
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not that that makes any difference to this discussion
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Seriously.
Yahoo's plain vanilla search is on par with Google's, but Yahoo's local search is much better, which is why I switched back to Yahoo for search.
Also, Yahoo Maps Beta is superior to Google Maps/Google Earth, at least at the moment. And obviously Yahoo has a lot of content that Google does not have (i.e. Fantasy Football, etc.).
Anyways, sorry to sound like a Yahoo Fanboy, but I'm just a little irritated whe
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Google Local / Maps knows a hell of a lot about my local area in the UK, which Y! seems to be lacking. From what else I've seen Google also does the rest of Europe, and most of urban Russia and Asia to a similar degree. Yahoo! gives up anywhere past mapping major roads and has only a vague idea about addresses and local services.
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Well, except the UI for ranking your players before the draft is godawful. The rest is pretty sweet, or at least a lot of fun.
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Translation (Score:1, Insightful)
quote me as saying i was misquoted (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, how "will" Yahoo "monetize" these "assets"? Inquiring "minds" want to "know".
We "lose" money on every "transaction" ... (Score:3, Funny)
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Admirably cromulent description!
Submitter (Score:1, Insightful)
Not that he would be biased or anything, but if any Flickr users want to drop their accounts seeing how Flickr is doomed and your baby photos will have Lower Your Bills flash ads all over them, there're (hint, hint) other sites out there.
I know... (Score:1, Funny)
What on God's green earth... (Score:1)
Ahem [del.icio.us].
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h.al.va; although to be frank, I'm clueless about what the Vatican has to do with it.
KFG
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when Yahoo bought GeoCities (Score:2)
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Shill.
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Will this pop the so called Web 2.0 bubble? (Score:1)
Seriously thought-provoking question. (Score:2)
PHB Speak 2.0 (Score:2, Interesting)
Then again, they could always find some sucker^h^h^h^h^h^hinvestor to buy it off of them for a stupid amount of money and make a small fortune out of a big one.
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Uh-huh. You know, just because you aren't familiar with a word doesn't mean it's "management speak". It's been around since 1875 [reference.com], is derived from the Latin "moneta" and as far as I can tell is in every major dictionary.
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So, either yahoo is going to start printing money, or the gp poster is right and this term has been co-opted from its' 1875 usage and is now used exclusively by corporate slimeballs.
Personally, I'm thinking it's the latter.
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*YES* it's an old word - but with a *DIFFERENT* meaning. It is supposed to mean - 'to make something into actual currency' (think stamping gold to make coins). NOT 'to make financial gain from'.
FFS!
Well, if it's anything like... (Score:5, Informative)
They took what was (for those of us *still* following the SCO Group stock scam/FUD campaign/pump and dump fraud) the best venue for discussing the evidence presented by IBM and Novell, the utter and complete lack of any evidence presented by SCOX, and the discovery of even more evidence of Caldera knowing they didn't have shit to go on. Now, it's a mere shadow of what it once was, and it's overrun by worthless trolls and SCOX apologists. What used to be a place where the fantastic researchers would shine their 10 million candlepower spotlights on miserable fat Belgian bastards, inventors with vaporware operating systems, other "inventors" with bad haircuts and no sense of humor, hack wannabe code monkeys suckling at the teat of MSFT largesse, or rhodium miners with a penchant for hallucinogens, it is now just a cold, dank, murky underworld. The place to be for financial discussions is NOT Yahoo Finance. InvestorVillage has filled in quite nicely, BTW. As far as I'm concerned, Yahoo is run by yahoos.
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Well D'oh! Have you ever watched the Houyhnhnms try to type in code? It's pitiful.
KFG
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Monitize? (Score:1)
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Really? According to Random House [reference.com] it's been in use since 1875. I guess it's time to retire that 1874 dictionary!
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It ma not be the "Queen's" English, but I found monetize [webster.com] in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Based on the way I interpret the definition, I think Mr. Hawk is using it incorrectly. I read it as Yahoo will start printing money.
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Social networking sites have a life cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look at Alexa traffic rankings for "social networking" sites. Many, if not most, of them have already peaked.
EZboard peaked mid 2003. Nerve peaked early 2002. Bondage.com peaked mid-2003. Tribe peaked early 2006. Xianz (the "Christian Myspace") peaked in spring 2006. Friendster peaked twice, once in late 2005 and again in mid-2006, but that's an unusual pattern. Usually, once they peak, it's downhill after that. Myspace has flattened and looks like it's about to peak. This works just like nightclubs; they become hot, they grow, they get too popular, they get overrun, they decline, they hang on, but nobody cares.
If you try to "monetize" the users, they leave sooner.
The real winner in this space seems to be AdultFriendFinder.com [alexa.com]. 57th most popular site on the web, 35th in the US, steady traffic for two years, and it's a pay site. Run by Friendfinder, Inc., the notorious spammers. They seem to have figured out how to "monetize the user base". However, Friendfinder may be inflating their statistics [ripoffreport.com].
Monetize Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to slit your wrists from living in a disconnected, hollow, completely monetized world? As in life, so in death: charge 'em! Charge 'em to live, charge 'em to die, charge 'em for every goddamn second in between.
Bow down to the almighty dollar, oops, I mean charge 'em to bow down to the almighty dollar.
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Re:Monetize Everything (Score:4, Funny)
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guess (Score:1)
They could stop sucking (Score:3, Informative)
Flick her... (Score:1)
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As for Flickr, my interest has wained so much that at the moment I'm basically only using it because
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Why has your interest waned? Has something changed? My primary uses for Flickr are:
1) An online photo album for friends and f
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Primary reason: Other people don't want my photos of them made public.
I have other hosting options, or email, if I want to share photos. I manually edit my blog on my own little corner of the web and can host pics there -- mostly it's not personal photos I use, it's product shots anyway. I have five PCs and I burn backups of all of my stuff to DVD, so Flickr's not part of my backup system.
Really though, the era of sharing every scrap of your daily existance on the Intertubes
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Really though, the era of sharing every scrap of your daily existance on the Intertubes is drawing to a close.
Well, you can file that next to "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." and "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
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Yeah. I've heard that before...;-P
Oh! And rock on the GitS fan...:-)
Monetize = exist (Score:1)
Companies that didn't figure this out used up all their venture capital and went out of business.
If people want services like Flickr to exist, they should hope that their owners find a way to monetize them. At the same time, the companies need to find a way to do this without ruining what drew people to the services in the first place.
Yahoo sucks (Score:1)
a disclaimer that should have been included (Score:1)