Yahoo! at Groucho

Into town today for a roundtable lunch about social media with Yahoo luminaries Bradley Horowitz, Glen Drury, and George Hadjigeorgiou, plus a bunch of digerati like Mike Butcher, Hugh Macleod, Sam Sethi and Adriana Cronin-​​Lucas.

If you get a group of people like that in the same room for a couple of hours, then you can guar­antee that the dis­cus­sion is going to be wide-​​ranging. Understandably, then, we covered the Facebook and Twitter booms, anxi­eties about privacy and one’s digital foot­print, the atten­tion economy, and more. I’ll leave the last word on that part of the dis­cus­sion to Mike who pointed out, “This is all so new. We can’t even begin to under­stand what its effects will be.”

Bradley — whose job descrip­tion appears to be “making cool stuff happen” — kicked off the formal part of the dis­cus­sion with a short present­a­tion about the company’s strategy. Its mission, he said, was, “con­necting people with their passions and their com­munities.” Internally, the company has a group called Brickhouse that is all about how it can trans­ition the positive exper­i­ence that people get from flickr and other recent acquis­i­tions to other prop­er­ties in the Yahoo stable. The photo-​​sharing site exhibits a number of virtues that aren’t always true of other social media sites:

• Almost 100% com­mit­ment. Other sites seem to follow a 1:10:100 rule when it comes to the number of creators, com­ment­ators and idle con­sumers. Perhaps this is because photos are some­thing anyone can do, and an interest in sharing photos would be the main reason for going to the site in the first place. In any case, flickr doesn’t follow this rule, but rather has a much larger pro­por­tion of active users.
• Self-​​policing. One of Yahoo’s fears in pur­chasing flickr was that it would descend into hosting a lot of por­no­graphy. Apparently, this has happened on a lot of other photo-​​storage sites. However, because its users are so active and caring about the quality of the com­munity, this hasn’t been the case with flickr.
• Quality. One issue Bradley pointed to with a lot of UGC sites — YouTube was given as an example — is that quality doesn’t rise to the top. A chimp doing karate seems to have gained a lot more atten­tion than serious art shorts on that site, for example. The inter­est­ing­ness algorithm on flickr allows high quality pictures to rise to the top without explicit user inter­ac­tion, such as voting. This passive input by users — also found on last.fm — is very much seen as the route forward for finding valuable con­tri­bu­tions to social sites.

I’ll para­phrase the rest of the Yahoo guys’ comments, to take out any ambi­gu­ities, and I freely admit any inac­curacies are my own. Yahoo is keen to position itself as a dif­ferent sort of company to Google. That’s under­stand­able, since direct com­par­isons on search traffic aren’t going to look good for the company. Its take appears to be that Google is posi­tioned as the master of the machine — creating the algorithms that keep people going back. It doesn’t want to position itself as the second-​​best in this regard. Second-​​best at search means zero traffic, as any current indic­ator of search traffic will reveal. Yahoo wants to be the best at sites that are people-​​centred; to bring the best parts of flickr, del.icio.us, upcoming and myb­lo­glog back in as a core value proposition.

But Yahoo wasn’t just making a branding state­ment. Like Google and other media com­panies, its business, essen­tially, is in selling advert­ising. Understanding their users, getting hold of their lifestream, was revealed as a key strategy in its acquis­i­tions. Through the four sites men­tioned above, and further launches and pur­chases, they’ll know an awful lot about users. What will they do with that? They’ll sell it to advert­isers. Because advert­isers need to ser­i­ously raise their game when it comes to getting any response. I’ve had banner adverts switched-​​off in my browser for nearly three years (use the AdBlock Plus exten­sion for Firefox or the ‘block content’ right-​​click command in Opera). How will the advert­isers get me to stop fil­tering out their messages? By making those messages either very enter­taining or very useful. If I get offers and sug­ges­tions that are genu­inely relevant to what I do and what I want, then I’ll stop fil­tering. Of course, only a small minority of (quite geeky) people are actively stopping their browsers from dis­playing ads, but they are fil­tering them non­ethe­less, through the simple ability to just ignore them.

Yahoo knows this. It knows that to deliver value to advert­isers, it’ll have to deliver audi­ences that actually care. And it’ll find the people who actually care through social media sites. NB: user data is cur­rently anonymised, according to George, though Sam saw the pos­sib­ility for Yahoo to act as a trusted broker for his atten­tion. He’ll happily give up plenty of inform­a­tion about his life, in return for payment.

One last inter­esting tidbit: Yahoo has already mocked-​​up a Facebook-​​like shell site for internal con­sid­er­a­tion that can bring together user inform­a­tion from its various prop­er­ties. According to Bradley, this will/​would also allow for the import of inform­a­tion from third-​​party sites. More import­antly, perhaps, a Yahoo equi­valent to Facebook would also have an open API allowing the inform­a­tion users put into the site to be exported out again, à la del.icio.us. No more re-​​creating profiles and friends lists! There was a lot of spec­u­la­tion last year about Yahoo pur­chasing Facebook. It may well be the case that a DIY job is on the cards.

Edited for grammar

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