Not sure if there’s great significance to the Yahoo announcement, highlighted in this post by Jonathan Dube at cyberjournalist.net, that the web portal is backing away from earlier announced plans to fairly aggressively pursue an original-content policy. Jonathan reports:
Yahoo is scaling back plans to produce original content, such as sitcoms, talk shows and other television-style programs, and will instead focus on content acquired from other media companies and submitted by users.
The site is not going to cancel its first high-profile efforts at original programming — “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone,” a series of war reports, and “Richard Bangs Adventures,” travelogues about unusual locales — but it is shelving other other initiatives…
Several thoughts spring to mind: it’s easier to buy content than to create it, and the success of videoblogging, YouTube and other video-sharing sites has pointed the way not just to user-created content but to an audience for it.
The cynic in me also wants to point out that tapping into user-created content is not (yet) a big budget item.
The significance here, I think, though isn’t that Yahoo is retreating from something adventurous (establishing itself as a major media company). It’s that it seems to be a recognition of the gloriously messy media present where ideas are floated and experiments tried because no-one know what shape media will or can take. Newspapers are creating video, big TV is blowing up its schedule, big internet companies are turning to “amateurs” for content, search engines creating original content, new distribution for old stuff…like I said, gloriously messy.
Too, if Yahoo is to jump on user-created content in a big way, that could provide a bigger platform and wider audience for some of the great stuff being created, and more competition (for time and eyeballs) for the old folks in legacy media.
TAGS: YAHOO, CONTENT, USER-GENERATED
