This is a guest post by Mic Wright, a freelance writer and journalist. He writes too much about bad television shows. You can follow him on Twitter on @brokenbottleboy
Yahoo! should really ditch that exclamation mark. Not only is it a throwback to a time before the first internet bubble burst, when quirky company names were still charming and not the sort of thing that makes any sane human being want to wrench their own arm off and beat themselves to death with the soggy end, but also because the company has no reason to feel exuberant.
Nobody knows what Yahoo! is for. Not even Yahoo! Especially not the bosses attempting to navigate Yahoo! away from the plughole. The company's latest wheeze, after attempting to pursue a strategy as a quality content provider, is to chase the tail of the Huffington Post and enlist an army of amateurs to pump out "content" (content being a noun frequently meaning: "free stuff that we can slap advertising on").
The Yahoo! Contributor Network has been up and running in the US for some time where other content farms like Demand Media have upped the heart rates of jaded execs in failing media conglomerates. It's the "pay pennies, earn dollars" logic that's driving this move into content farming. Unlike the Huffington Post -- the Great Satan of web publishing in my book --the Yahoo! Contributor Network pays its content drones. Sadly that pay is of such menial value that it works out at less than minimum wage. Boo! Hiss! When does the pantomime dame come back on? (And I don't mean Arianna Huffington. That would just be mean.)
To the professional journalists lured into the Yahoo! Death Star during the days of the "quality content" strategy, the Contributor Network is a slap in the face. That's why several of them leaked the initial email about the Yahoo! Contributor Network well ahead of the official UK announcement. They have been frequently prevented from undertaking original journalism in favour of repurposing existing content and now they must watch as Yahoo! bases its future on the keyword-chasing stuff spluttering out of the Contributor Network.
Yahoo! has allowed Flickr, which if managed correctly could have dominated photo sharing on the web, to fester. Facebook now owns the consumer photo sharing market while professionals become more and more disillusioned with Yahoo!'s rampant mismanagement of Flickr. Meanwhile Yahoo! has divested itself of numerous other interesting products including social bookmarking site Delicious, which it just could not figure out, despite many tweaks.
Yahoo! is a company that has suffered from several years of bad management. Once one of the titans of the web, it's now just a kookily punctuated irrelevance. As Google works harder to deny content-farmed articles prominence in news and search results, the Contributor Network will not save Yahoo! from its decline. It is an admission of defeat, waving the white flag to Arianna Huffington's belief that professional writers don't need to be paid, that exposure is some universal currency that'll buy you a loaf and a pint of milk in any corner shop.
The fact that the Yahoo! Contributor Network pays fees is virtually irrelevant as they are so pitiful. Based on the figures quoted in the leaked email I received, the initial fee for articles will be £20. That works out at £0.025/word for an 800 word article. The authors flagged up as examples in the initial communication had received £60+ from articles they had written. Assuming they earned exactly £60 in the three weeks since publication date, the traffic bonus brought the effective word rate up to £0.075/word.
As the leaked Yahoo! Contributor Network email suggested 70p would be earned for every 1000 page views, that means the pieces raised as examples would have needed to pull in around 57,000 to hit the £60+ totals. It's possible that lots of people really are that interested in "black bridal wear" but fees don't take into account time for research, fact checking or interviewing. It's likely most pieces won't feature much of any of those.
Cheaply-produced content geared to keywords may bring eyeballs through search and social networks but its unlikely to right the listing HMS Yahoo! and stop it from sinking further into irrelevance. Yahoo! is not innovating. It is chasing a model pioneered by the Huffington Post and Demand Media. Its once proud boasts of believing in quality content are as laughable as that vestigial exclamation mark.
Image: Shutterstock.com
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