Gary Stein points us to the Hollywood Reporter’s interesting interview with Lloyd Braun, the new head of content at Yahoo.
Yahoo! right now has a very strong, deep content presence on the Web. We have 16 of these vertical sites, which I call channels — not because they’re like television. It’s not going to be a place where we’re going to do our version of “Alias” or “Lost” or any of those shows. But these places are young on the evolutionary scale of what they’re going to look like. My job is really to define — with this group of executives that I have — what is Internet content going to be? Right now, we’re an aggregator of information with some interesting broadband components. We have these great deals with JibJab and Mark Burnett (for extra content from NBC series “The Apprentice”). There’s going to be more and more of that. But that will represent only the beginning of where this is going to end up.
…THR: What will be the business model for acquiring content for Yahoo!?
Braun: I’ll tell you this. I’m giving great thought that as we construct these models, that in success we are not going to create a system that does exist in television now where there are such crushing upfront costs that the whole weight of the system makes it feel like it’s going to break. We have to be thoughtful not to just look at this business where it is now but where it will be five, 10 years from now. Because once we start establishing these precedents, they get very, very hard to break. I don’t pretend to have the answers to this yet, but I am giving an enormous amount of thought to the issues.