Comments on: On Mayer, Yahoo!, and The (Other) Customer

By: The future of Yahoo Media in the Marissa Mayer era is in New York | TekDefender

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 22:17:53 +0000

[...] and Yahoo as they continue to court, build, and diversify Yahoo’s advertising business. Federated Media’s John Battelle has written wellabout how Mayer will need to “bring her fanatical product focus to more than just Yahoo’s [...]

By: Prosyna

Prosyna — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 21:56:00 +0000

Hi John.

Interesting read about Yahoo. I am not sure what will happen to this
company and I don’t know if they can transform to something different and market
relevant. It is 20 year old company which sometimes look more like AOL
compare to the ‘new kids’.

My comment is about the search and the new Yahoo! Axis. (BTW: As I write
this, I still can’t get the app on my iPad. Apple plot??) I would propose
that nobody really does search properly. The problem is that by trying to
be all to everybody, search doesn’t serve well anybody. Think about the
way you search for things. Sometime you do ‘quick’ search – I am looking
word definition, quick fact, restaurant, etc. Quick type, few words, easily
done on your mobile device. Then you do ‘re-search’ – I would like to know
about topic, but need to understand relationships. Requires differently
worded questions, following numerous links, bookmarking pages, etc. It is
done easier on non-mobile devices. Another type of search is a ‘social search’
- I need to know about something, but I also need to know, who knows about
it. The simple example is ‘I like to go to restaurant which my friends
approve’, but can quickly grow into very complex exercise.

We can analyze what’s wrong with the search by showing examples from Google
- Google created this sub-second response, instant gratification search,
which works reasonably well for the first type, the ‘quick’ search.
Anything beyond that gets tricky. Its attempt to perform search across multiple
properties/domains is cute. See for yourself – go to google.com, type your
name and start clicking across the various tabs at the top. You can get
results about yourself on the main page, images (btw: Nice finger pointing picture),
gets funny on the map tab and completely breaks on YouTube, GoogleDocs.
Google is not even capable to perform search within its own systems!! When
you try to ‘re-search’, Google’s ability to interact with search results is
C+ at the best. This looks like where the new Axis app is going. It allows
people to interact with search and keep the search results. Finally, the
‘social search’. You are completely out of luck with Google (nope, Google+
doesn’t count) and you go either a) where people socializing, or b) to
specialized sites like Yelp.

In summary, Yahoo is on the right track here. In order to be truly useful,
it should add the human element. Without it, it will remain just neat tool.

Thanks for your time reading this.

cheers

Vaclav

By: johnbattelle

johnbattelle — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 18:41:00 +0000

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, and I agree. The two should be coordinated, however, it’s not going to be good enough to do just one or the other.

By: agarwal113

agarwal113 — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 06:54:00 +0000

First post on Marissa Mayer post her CEO announcement that spectacularly touches two of the most important elements on Yahoo Business 1. Users 2. Marketers. Everything else really doesn’t matter.

John, i think what yahoo really needs today is to revonate their existing products and make it look more like web 2.0 or web 3.0. If you see Yahoo’s most trafficed portals eg. Yahoo finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo OMG,Yahoo news, their homepage and some other, they haven’t changed since past 5-6 years. They are not social. They do not allow you to connect with other users. It is surprising to know the fact that Yahoo still does not have a ‘Follow’ button on any of their portal. They do not allow you to have conversations. I think personal touch is missing in most of the Yahoo products. Which is a must for higher engagement on any consumer products. If you look at most successful consumer internet products Facebook, tumblr, youtube, pinterest, twitter, instagram, social cam etc etc they have few things in common. They all have ‘Follow’ button deeply integrated in their products. They allow us to “CONNECT” with other people of our interest. They all have a personal touch and thus these products become integral part of our lives.

I think yahoo needs to crack that first and win their users back. They have a great great social product “Flickr” which i think could well have become Instagram had they pivoted and adapted themselves to the changing habits of the users.

Winning marketers is absolutely equally important because they write cheques to Yahoo. But before that i think winning back users is more important and should be a priority. And i think Marissa being a product person, is a good fit compared to levinsohn and other non-product people.

Anuj Agarwal
Founder
feedspot.com

By: Hironbin

Hironbin — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 19:40:00 +0000

Nice Post. Thanks for share..

By: Snoggler

Snoggler — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 14:34:00 +0000

Yahoo Japan is a joint venture, Yahoo Incs owns less than 35% stake. it’s actually part of the assets Yahoo Inc is trying to sell. I don’t think it’s the Yahoo brand that makes it a success in Japan, the folks at Japan simply have done a great job in localization, and offer better products than their US counterpart.

By: addictive! the full service mobile agency

addictive! the full service mobile agency — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 07:01:27 +0000

[...] The most surprising news this week was that Yahoo poached one of Googles top people as their new CEO. Whilst Yahoo have their problems, they are still a big player on desktop and on the web. If Marissa Meyer can reignite the innovation and continue to deliver big audience they have a chance. John Battelle looks at how Yahoo can be a tech business and a media business. [...]

By: george

george — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 04:29:00 +0000

I feel bad for RL; he never had a real chance to stretch and develop higher aspirations for Yahoo. But that’s in the rearview mirror now and what you’ve described as Yahoo’s two sets of customers is a big challenge. From my POV, it ultimately comes down to the end-user experience, and that’s where they’ve really lost ground. Unfortunately, Yahoo has failed to transform and pair their rich content based model with a deep social experience.

Where to begin? Build more “user self-marketing” features; that’s where the need improvement.Best of luck to the New CEO!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:58:00 +0000

My point is that Marissa is very good at product as it relates to the consumer, but she’s going to have to learn how to do that in the context of brand advertising. Doing that is not new, it’s what publishers have done forever. As for the social/network effect side of the equation, I think great products and content are naturally shared objects. Leveraging that isn’t rocket science.

By: Klaus

Klaus — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:52:00 +0000

John, I always appreciate your insights! But this posts reads a bit like motherhood and apple pie doesn’t it. The issue you bring up is true for all two-sided business models, and as you say is an age-old reality if not problem in publishing. I guess the newer questions for internet businesses and with the rise of social media are around how to effectively leverage network effects within such business models. But maybe I’m missing your point on this one?