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How Will Yahoo "Monetize" Their Social Networks?
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."
Use little icons showing different Monet paintings at the head of each page.
liqbase
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could hope to keep up, resulting in Yahoo charging for faster integration into their index and the index becoming out of date very fast.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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Those will be slathered in ads to the point of being unusable; much like geocities, yahoo groups, etc.
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.
How Will Yahoo "Monetize" Their Social Networks? ...and talked about leveraging these "assets" and targeting and profiling a large growing registered audience base
Yes, how "will" Yahoo "monetize" these "assets"? Inquiring "minds" want to "know".
Alas, it seems that "monetization" is the latest in (mis)management speak.
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.
...the fiasco with the Yahoo Message Boards, it will be a resounding fuck up.
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.
but we "make up" for it in "volume".
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
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. 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.
Let's just get it over with. Monetize everything. Every social interaction should be monetized. How many times have you had a conversation where the other party just wasn't holding up their end? Charge 'em! Sex? Whoever has the most fun, charge 'em! Air, water? Monetize the crap out of those! Let's put a fence around every goddamn thing in the universe and make money off of it. It was free before? Who cares! Tragedy of the commons, man, tragedy of the commons. Everything should be owned. Every possible combination of letters, numbers, muscial notes, symbols, everything. Put a meter in everyone's head, when they even think about your intellectual property, charge 'em!
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Their abuse department for 360 is completely useless. At first it wasn't bad, occasionally I had to resubmit one when someone just missed the boat, but lately they've been utterly useless and incompetent. They have profiles of old males which consist of nothing but shots of their penis, and their entire friend list consists of profiles reputedly belonging to 14 and 15 year old girls, and Yahoo can't seem to find their way to removing the obvious adult themed photos even after repeated resubmission, even though its clearly against their ToS (unless that was quietly changed in the last few months to allow that type of thing ot be okay). Having a friends list full of teen girls isn't against the rules, but to me it only compounds the issue of why this 50 year old guy is allowed to keep a dozen pics of his penis on his profile.