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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."
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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could hope to keep up, resulting in Yahoo charging for faster integration into their index and the index becoming out of date very fast.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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...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.