Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Yahoo announced a couple days ago that they are working with Intel on a new initiative, called Yahoo Connected TV, that aims to make TV more interactive. Connected TV will allow users to use their TV remote to personalize and manage TV Widgets. So what exactly are TV Widgets? According to Yahoo “TV Widgets are small Web applications that make it easy to surf your favorites sites with your remote control. Watch Web videos, track your favorite teams or stocks, interact with friends and family, and stay current on news and information by clicking on the compact, interactive apps that sit on top of your normal TV picture.”

Yahoo will be  offering developers the opportunity to build their own TV Widgets through their Widget Development Kit (WDK). Yahoo TV Widgets are powered by the Yahoo’s Widget Engine that uses standard web tools like JavaScript, XML, HTML and Flash - therefore making creation fairly easy. Yahoo will only be making the WDK available to a limited amount of developers and companies but I expect them to slowly roll this out to the general audience fairly quickly once they get a handle on the service.

Personally I am surprised we haven’t seen better Internet / TV integration. I don’t want to connect my PC  or MAC to my TV or use a Web TV type service. I want components of the Internet easily accessible using my existing Digital Cable box and existing TV remote - Yahoo Connected TV seems to have the promise of delivering what could possibly be the next big innovation in Interactive Television. However, Yahoo will have to be careful to not make this too commercial or intrusive into the TV watchers experience. Adding widgets of components of the Internet I am interested in is one thing, allowing for company to intrude on the experience with advertisements is another thing.

Yahoo will be launching sometime soon (my guess is early 2009) with  6 available TV Widgets, which include:

• Sports
  
• Flickr Photos
  
• News
  
• Weather
  
• Finance
  

Here are a couple of screenshots of what the TV Widgets could / will look like:

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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.

Nothing upsets me more than when a company tries to take advantage of their situation. As I mentioned in my SEO Domain Strategy 101 article, I own great deal of domains - in fact the exact number eludes me but I know it is around 1,800 or so. I have been buying, building and collecting domains since at least the mid-90’s and for a few years in the late 90’s I used Yahoo’s Domain service for most of my domain purchasing and hosting. Even though I have since moved all of my hosting away from Yahoo I still have about 150 domains that are housed and auto-renewed with Yahoo. Most of these domains I have never done anything with or have just held onto since I registered them for whatever reason. Every year I get my annual auto-renew letter, the price usually fluctuates, but it has always stayed in the $9.95 to $14.95 range. Whatever, no big deal since all my good domains are housed elsewhere and I have it on my list to transfer all of my domains to one company (not Yahoo).

Well imagine my surprise when I received the below email from Yahoo this morning. Yahoo is now charging $34.95 for domain renewals. Are you kidding me? $34.95? I am shocked when I see domain renewals costs over $10…$34.95 had me thinking it was an error. So, I proceed to call Yahoo and their helpful customer service staff confirmed the price change that went into effect July 1st. Wow. I am absolutely stunned by this. Anyone with any sort of domain knowledge will say that this is an absolute rip off by Yahoo and will result in a mass exodus of domains.

After digesting this for a few hours I started to think about what was Yahoo’s reasoning behind the price increase considering they are now nowhere near competitive. My first conclusion was that they wanted out of the domain business, so basically if  you don’t transfer your domain you would pay 3 - 4 times the going rate Fewer domains, higher profit margin. Hmm, doesn’t make much business sense since the new fee of $34.95 a year per domain would probably not cover all of the domains they ended up losing. My next thought was that they are trying to up sell me different services (like domain hosting and email), that when bundled together would decrease my overall renewal cost - for example, sign up for Yahoo’s $9.95 monthly web hosting and get your domain renewal free. This is a very common practice…however, when you look at the email below there is no mention of any other service. Housing a domain costs nothing except a $.20 yearly ICANN fee and a few bytes of space.

So what is the deal Yahoo? Did some moronic product manager slip this one by while Yahoo has been in chaos? If anyone has any idea as to Yahoo’s logic behind this ridiculous increase in domain renewal fee please share. In the mean time I will be busy transferring my remaining domains away from Yahoo.

When you are fighting for your life you need to do anything you can to save it. Yahoo executives, who are fighting for their jobs, are using their most valuable asset - the Yahoo.com Homepage - in their fight against Carl Icahn.

The Yahoo homepage, which is the most visited single page on the internet, is being used to let shareholders know the “truth” about Carl Icahn and convince the voters that his plans are wrong for the future of Yahoo. As you can see from the image at the bottom of this post, Yahoo didn’t just give the Icahn / Microsoft fight some meaningless real estate, we are talking big graphical call-outs on the right side and footer…space that is probably worth a very high CPM and garners millions of daily eyeballs. When you click on one of the two locations it takes you to a “Yahoo Stockholder Information” page that calls out Icahn and focuses on two big points: “The Icahn Slate Is Not the Right Answer for Yahoo!” and “Yahoo!’s Experienced Board and Executive Leadership Are Positioning Yahoo! for Future Success”. Basically, Yahoo points out the many flaws in Icahn’s plans and tries to discredit his business experience by calling out his not so good recent involvements with public companies.

So what exactly is Yahoo looking to get out of this? First they are trying to get every single Yahoo voting shareholder to side with the current executive team, there is even a convenient “vote now” button. Secondly, I am sure that Yahoo, who has been hammered recently in the press, could use any positive sway in public opinion. However, I would assume that any shareholder that cares to vote are well versed in what is been going on since every major media outlet online and offline has covered this Yahoo / Microsoft / Icahn battle in great detail from the beginning.

To me this reeks a bit of desperation, however it is understandable desperation. The fact that Yahoo has leveraged its homepage for their proxy fight shows that this battle very close - probably even more close than anyone expected.

Last night Yahoo announced the launch of another piece in their “open” puzzle by releasing Yahoo Search BOSS. BOSS, which stands for Build your Own Search Service, allows anyone to build and launch a custom search platform that is powered by Yahoo! search’s proprietary technology and infrastructure.

I played around with BOSS today and it is pretty cool, however it really isn’t that innovative considering both Microsoft and Google already offer their own custom search solutions. The difference with BOSS is that Yahoo really does give more control over the key part of any search engine - the rankings and results. Basically, Yahoo allows the user to manipulate the rankings however they see fit, this will really come in handy for more advanced users that are looking for their own unique search engine but do not have the resources to build it themselves.

Here is a list of features that are currently available with BOSS (Yahoo plans on rolling out more features over the next few months).

• Ability to re-rank and blend results.
• Presentation flexibility: no Yahoo display / branding requirements.
• BOSS Mashup Framework: allows developers to mashup search results with other public data sources.
• Access to web, news and image search.
• No rate limits on daily queries.

So why is Yahoo! launching BOSS? Two main reasons: 1) to grow their share of the search market and 2) create new revenue streams. I am not exactly sure how successful they will be with both but here is what Yahoo had to say about it…

“First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success — opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS — will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, we see a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo! Search experience and as a result, improve the quality of results our BOSS partners and their users get. Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, we’ll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.”

Since I have used Google’s Custom Search Engine on numerous properties for some time now, the question becomes would I switch to BOSS? Not right away, but once Yahoo releases some other features and I see BOSS in action more, it is definitely something I will consider.