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Jerry Yang’s return to Yahoo has bestowed a little halo on the company that many hope will grow. Returning to substantially geeky roots, the potential of Yang’s return brings to mind those 80’s film montages where a band of downtrodden misfits gets their collective act together.
And downtrodden they should be. It’s tough getting compared to the “cool kids” all the time. Or in Yahoo’s case, Google, the gleaming-robot-overlord kids. One gets the sense that Yang is mad as hell and won’t take it any more when he says: "Yahoo is too often defined by the competitive landscape. ... I am determined for us to find our own path."
Steep and narrow is the path, especially when Yahoo’s market position continues to be perceived as squarely against Google in the arena of search (and by extension, search-based advertising). But Yang may be onto the right path.
As Abbey Klaassen at Ad Age reports: “Mr. Yang said he sees Yahoo differentiating itself by being the best partner to other companies -- both in content and advertising. "We are good at partnering and we intend to scale that in an aggressive way."”
Yahoo’s Yang is pointing squarely at the human element. Whereas Google has voraciously aggregated content and developed web-based applications, Yahoo has been cautiously edging towards an editorial position through content partnerships. As it turns out, Yahoo is excellent at developing content partnerships. Under the Yahoo flag, they have developed content sections which have grown increasingly rich with media network and magazine partnerships. While Google aggregates and monetizes, Yahoo is laying in a foundation of editorial content curation, development, and associating it with the Yahoo brand.
Google has dominated the arena of branded utility. Google is already a verb; one Googles for information. In the past, Yahoo made a play for the verb space with the campaign “Do you, uh, Yahoo?,” but recently has focused on “What Yahoos are into.” Yahoo now has the opportunity to make a play for the domain of branded content. The difference is subtle, but important: Yahoo’s focus is on the person, the mighty noun, the do-er of action. And people are into content.
It’s not a showdown, per se, but may signal the beginning of a philosophical divide between the companies and a subsequent shift in the consumer’s mind. Google, with its fantastic utility and engineering brilliance, is increasingly coming across to consumers as a company dedicated dominating advertising across all media. The Googleplex, operating under the neutrality of a “do no evil” credo, really doesn’t care about the content it attaches itself to, and by extension, the people who create the content.
Yahoo seems less interested in becoming a gateway to content as much as a home for content. With “People of the Web” features, and personalities dedicated to content categories, Yahoo is fusing its identity with the content it serves. Rather than rely solely on an algorithm to answer questions, Yahoo launched “Yahoo Answers,” which invites users to answer questions posed by other Yahoos.
The differentiation path for Yahoo and a strategy of accenting branded content over branded utility doesn’t come down solely to human vs. machine, but it is interesting to smell the renewed interest in human judgment in the air. This year, Google’s had to step up its efforts fighting spam in their index. As we see Yelp.com dominate the consumer-review space and human-powered indices like Mahalo.com begin to make news, it seems like Yahoo may be in a good position to push their position as the soul in the machine.
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