Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Back in February Yahoo launched their social voting / bookmarking with only a handful of hand-picked publishers. Well finally Yahoo Buzz is now open to the public…let the spamming and widget adding begin.

Yahoo Buzz basically operates like Digg, or similar sites, where users vote for the stories that interest them. The more times a story is “Buzz’d” the higher up in the results they show. There is one key difference between Yahoo Buzz and other social sites - Yahoo allows “editorial discretion” when it comes to headlines in order to prevent serious gaming.

Here is how Yahoo describes the Yahoo Buzz process: “First, we determine the most popular topics that people are searching for on Yahoo! Then, we showcase the most popular stories within those topics, based on activities like voting and emailing stories to friends. Stories with most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page - you can impact what millions will see on Yahoo!.”

So what is the big deal? Who really wants to add another social widget to their website / blog? Bottom line is that the top Yahoo Buzz stories get pushed to the Yahoo.com homepage - this link would obvioulsy generate a serious amount of traffic to the linked website. If it wasn’t for the possibility of stories hitting Yahoo.com I would be ho-hum on this.

I would obviously recommend adding a Yahoo Buzz widget to any blog / website under the category of “why not”. However, I am not sold on the traffic impact for the 99.999% of stories that don’t get to the Yahoo homepage.  Yahoo Buzz definitely deserves some monitoring in terms of  how stories get ranked and what kind of traffic it generates.

I will post a follow-up story once I have gathered enough information.

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