Yahoo Is Clearly Up To Something Big Around Music

There have been rumors that Yahoo Music is preparing to launch a big new product sometime soon. And when I read this overview of a presentation given by Yahoo Music’s VP of Product Development Ian Rogers last month it basically confirmed it for me: expect something new and interesting from Yahoo Music in the near future.

Some background: Rogers, along with former Yahoo music GM David Goldberg, was one of the first music industry insiders to actively call for the dismantling of the DRM machine (I interviewed both early last year).

Rogers also made an impassioned speech last October calling for sanity in the music industry. “Inconvenience doesn’t scale,” he said. And - suing Napster for popularizing music sharing was “like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.” He ended that talk by saying he wouldn’t let Yahoo spend any more money on flawed music models. He specifically called all-you-can-eat subscription models flawed; and Yahoo is a big provider of that service already.

He went even further in his most recent talk. The first part was a rehashing of previous presentations where he said “we’ve been trying to apply our physical world models to the digital space and then wondering why they don’t work. It’s like trying to live a normal life on the moon without adjusting to the changes in oxygen and gravity.” In one slide he suggests iTunes is nothing more than the application of old business models (represented by spreadsheets) and ownership over music content, resulting in an uninspiring product. People don’t want to just listen to what the record labels say they should listen to. They want to consume the content that people they trust recommend to them.

But he went further this time, saying “We’re in the process of redefining what Yahoo! Music is, and making it the Music destination in Yahoo!’s successful image.” He also says Yahoo isn’t a music retailer and suggests they won’t be in the future.

So what are they up to? He is championing the merger of content (which is what the labels control) with context (all the great user generated content around the passion of music - Last.fm popular songs, MySpace content, blog posts around new music, etc. This is a well of useful contextual information that helps people decide what they want to consume. He calls for the evolution of open standards to facilitate this goal - making media “a first-class object in HTML,” agreeing on ways to describe collections of media objects (playlists), standards for sharing user data, and defining services (search, resolution of media between services, and purchase or provisioning).

It’s clear that Yahoo wants to move in this direction. Their music site consists of great content but, other than the doomed subscription service, lacks any retail features. It’s unlikely Yahoo wants to get into the music sales game. Not only did Rogers say as much in the presentation, but it’s a very low margin business. Instead, and this is just an educated guess, it looks like Yahoo wants to spearhead an effort to create open standards around music buying, playing, managing and sharing. If that wasn’t the direction they were going, the presentation makes little sense.

In one set of slides near the end of the presentation, he shows a use case where a user discovers music on Yahoo, links to purchase it at Amazon, and then manages it again back at Yahoo. My guess is this is exactly what Yahoo will be. They’ll abandon their subscription music service (Rogers previously said the model was deeply flawed and has failed to get many users) and promote third party music download sites like Amazon instead. But I also imagine they’ll do this via a set of open standards where any service can participate. Yahoo is the worlds largest music site, so they can afford to be inclusive. It’s likely they’ll manage to keep their fair share of the users, even in an open world.

Half of me hopes that Yahoo pulls the plug on the project before it launches. What I’d really like to see is Rogers leave Yahoo and create a new startup based on the principles he believes in, without any compromise. Now that could be something interesting.

Link to TechCrunch Article

Yahoo Opens Up Its Mobile Platform To Third Parties

There are two ways for services to get themselves onto mobile devices. They either talk users into accessing limited functionality by browsing to their website, or they get their software (usually Java based) onto the phone somehow. And since the carriers still control every aspect of the mobile experience, getting that software onto a phone without their consent is difficult.

Google has experimented with it, as has Yahoo through their Go application. Get it on your phone somehow, and you can browse through various widgets - travel, weather, news, etc. Some consumers have gone to the trouble of downloading Google, Yahoo and others’ software on their phone. But now, third parties won’t have to jump over this hurdle. They can simply piggyback on Yahoo’s already installed software.

They’re relaunching the platform tomorrow. In addition to generic “improved performance,” for the first time third parties will be able to add their own software to the platform. It’s an open environment, meaning anyone can create a widget for Yahoo Go. Users will find them on Yahoo’s mobile site and can add them to their phone.

A software development kit for developers will be made available in the coming weeks, Yahoo says. Until then, users can add pre-made widgets from eBay, MySpace and MTV.

The Yahoo Mobile team has been chatting about this off record for almost a year now. We first expected to see it launch last Spring, but it never came. But they’ve finally got it out the door.

The Yahoo Mobile home page is also being relaunched tomorrow.

Link to TechCrunch Article

Yahoo Signs Licensing Deal With Sony BMG

YAHOO HAS SIGNED A BROAD new licensing agreement with Sony BMG that allows consumers to add music and video content from the label and its artists to user-generated creations.

The deal expands the catalog of music videos on Yahoo Music from Sony BMG, whose artists include Alicia Keys, Daughtry, Bruce Springsteen and Jennifer Lopez. It also allows the distribution of videos through a media player that users can access on other Yahoo properties and embed on third-party sites.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but they include a revenue-sharing agreement between Yahoo and Sony BMG on video advertising.

The agreement marks the first time Yahoo has licensed content from a major record label in connection with user-generated videos. Sony BMG signed a similar licensing deal with Google last year, and struck another last month with social networking site MySpace.

Under that deal, Sony will license music videos, select audio material and other content from its artist roster, and will make the content available on its artists' MySpace profile pages. The moves reflect a growing willingness by music companies to make their assets available online with fewer restrictions.

A new report released by JupiterResearch on Tuesday says that while digital sales will make up one-third of the music market by 2012, the growth online won't offset the drop in CD sales.

Piracy has been a chief concern of record labels and other traditional media companies heading online. Last month, a group of major media and Internet companies including Disney, NBC Universal, MySpace and Veto announced a set of guidelines calling for the use of filtering technologies and other steps to block the unauthorized use of copyrighted material in user-generated content online.

Yahoo is not part of the coalition, but plans to introduce its own monitoring and filtering system for unauthorized content next year.

Link to MediaPost Article

Google, Yahoo Plan Social Home Pages

Both Google and Yahoo aim to turn their email services into social networks. Both plan to introduce social features that keep people using their applications for longer. The idea is to turn iGoogle and MyYahoo into a more central hub that serves the triple purpose of being a personalized home page, an email inbox and a social networking profile.

So you can ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360-baby steps in a broader plan-although these will one day be integrated with the new socialized home pages. Google was shorter on details about its plan, but Joe Kraus, the executive who runs the OpenSocial alliance, admits there are opportunities with iGoogle, which syncs with Gmail and Google Talk.

Yahoo, on the other hand, is calls its social home page drive "Inbox 2.0." Yahoo Mail will add features like more prominently displaying messages from those whom you communicate with more. It also plans to add personal profile pages, links to other profile pages (not necessarily Yahoo-based), a news feed-like feature called "vitality," birthday lists, etc. Inbox 2.0 will compile data from all Yahoo services-from Yahoo Music to Yahoo Shopping-to create user profiles.

Read the whole story...

Link to MediaPost Article

Yahoo To KickStart Social Networking Efforts

Yahoo is reported to be working on a new social networking service that matches college students to employers.

Yahoo Kickstart give users profile pages which are focused on the user’s resume, LinkedIn style, as opposed to a Facebook or MySpace profile. Corporations and wannabe employers are then provided with groups that users can join, but with a catch: to join a group you need an invite via a former student who works at that company. For those users who would prefer something a little more social, University pages are open to all students and include discussion forums, bulletins and events.

According to CNet, Yahoo Kickstart is currently a concept only and may or may not see the light of day, either as a stand alone product or as part of an existing Yahoo property such as 360.

Yahoo’s has been trying to deal itself in to the hot social networking space for some time, but with little or no success. The Yahoo 360 blogging come social networking product never took off and Yahoo failed to acquire Facebook. There were even rumors that Yahoo was trying to buy Bebo in May.

More recently Yahoo was rumored to be working on a social networking product by the name of Yahoo Mosh.

Link to TechCrunch Article

Yahoo Expands Online-Ad Reach

Yahoo Inc. agreed to acquire closely held online-advertising company BlueLithium for about $300 million as the Internet giant tries to expand its ad reach beyond its own sites.

BlueLithium, founded in January 2004, operates what is known as an online-advertising network. It buys graphical-display ad slots, such as banners, on about 1,000 sites owned by other Web publishers and resells the slots to advertisers.

The purchase -- which follows a wave of online-ad acquisitions by Yahoo and rivals Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- is part of the Internet company's push to increase the number of places where advertising it sells appears. Yahoo is hoping such ad sales outside its own sites will help boost its ad-revenue growth as advertisers look beyond the big portal sites. It cited disappointing revenue from display ads in announcing a 2.3% drop in second-quarter profit in July.

"With our goal of creating the largest global ad network, this really moves us along the continuum," said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of the Yahoo Publisher Network, which handles relations with partner sites that carry ads brokered by Yahoo.

BlueLithium, of San Jose, Calif., which has 120 employees and declines to disclose its revenue, had previously planned to hold an initial public offering early next year. The company uses so-called behavioral-targeting technology, which allows advertisers to have their ads displayed to groups of consumers based on their online activities, such as individuals whose Web surfing suggests they are researching a car purchase.

Yahoo said data collected for such behavioral targeting will span its own sites and those on BlueLithium's network. It played down consumer-privacy concerns, saying the data collected would be used to display advertising more relevant to users in a way that respected their trust in Yahoo. The company said users will be allowed to opt out of the sharing of such behavioral data across Yahoo and BlueLithium's ad network.

Yahoo said BlueLithium will also bring additional tools for so-called performance-based advertisers, whose spending Yahoo says it hasn't sufficiently tapped. Such advertisers often allocate their ad dollars based largely on what given ads yield in terms of sales rather than looking for a more general improvement in perception of their brands.

Yahoo in April had paid $680 million for the remaining 80% of online-advertising exchange Right Media Inc., following a 20% stake it bought in October, as part of the strategy of expanding its advertising reach to other sites.

Link to WSJ Aritcle (Sub Req)

How will Yahoo address social networking?

The due date for Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s strategic plan isn’t here yet, but that hasn’t stopped the handicapping. Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck has a 22 page report addresses Yahoo’s options.

His conclusions:

• Yahoo will have to address its social networking strategy since Comscore reckons that social sites (think Facebook and MySpace) account for 60 percent of the world’s Internet users.
• These social sites have scattered the ad revenue pie.
• Social sites threaten the portal business model–also known as Yahoo’s bread and butter.
• A company like Yahoo could monetize a social site with behavioral targeting.

The big question: What is Yahoo going to do about it?

Peck writes:

“One of the topics we feel the company must be reviewing closely is Social Networking. Yahoo! has looked at this closely in the past, and in our opinion needs to decide what steps (if any) need to be made for Yahoo! to solidify its future with the impact coming from this ‘emerging’ phenomenon. We put emerging in quotes because social networking is nothing really new - Friendster was started back in 2002, and Yahoo! already has its own social network in Yahoo! 360. However, industry data shows that Yahoo! 360 has been losing ground to more popular networks, and to compound the problem that social networks are growing much faster than the “traditional portals ” like Yahoo!.”

Peck also notes that Yahoo needs to step up its social media initiatives via acquisition or partnership “or risk being marginalized in some of their business.”

Link to ZDNet Article

Yahoo to Revamp Video Site After Losing to YouTube

Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Yahoo! Inc., after losing out to Google Inc.'s YouTube, is revamping its video site by the end of the year to include more content from media companies and Internet users.

Music videos, movie trailers, television shows and sports highlights are among the features that will be available on the new site, Mike Folgner, Yahoo's general manager for video, said in an interview. Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site will also be adding video, he said.

``One of our strategies is to put video everywhere you are on the Internet,'' said Folgner, who joined the Sunnyvale, California-based company last year through Yahoo's acquisition of video site Jumpcut. ``We're going to build a much better destination for you to access all this different content.''

Yahoo wants to attract more visitors to its site at a time when more than 130 million Americans are viewing online video, based on ComScore Inc.'s May figures. Of the 8.36 billion streams viewed that month, Google, which acquired YouTube last year, accounted for 22 percent, Reston, Virginia-based ComScore said. Yahoo was third at 4.6 percent, behind News Corp.'s Fox pages, which includes social-networking site MySpace.

Shares of Yahoo, owner of the most-visited U.S. Web site, rose 11 cents to $23.36 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market and have dropped 8.5 percent this year. Shares of Mountain View, California-based Google slipped $1.93 to $511.01.

Yahoo has deals in place to use music videos from record companies including Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi SA, and EMI Group Plc, whose artists include Norah Jones and Radiohead, Folgner said. News services including the Associated Press and CNN will provide content along with sports leagues such as the National Football League and Major League Baseball.

``We already have a lot of these deals,'' Folgner said. ``We just don't service them in one place so you don't see them. We'll be able to drive a lot of traffic at this.''

Link to Bloomberg Article

Yahoo to Add Video Component to Photo Site Flickr

In an effort to broaden the range of media available to internet users, Yahoo announced it would be adding a video component to its photo-sharing site Flickr.

GM Mike Folgner of Yahoo Video said the company is committed to building "a much better destination for you to access all this different content.''

A means to this end is to "put video everywhere you are on the Internet," with emphasis on Flickr, reports Bloomberg.

The move puts the photo-sharing site in the arena of Google's video-sharing offering Youtube. And while it is not expected to overtake Youtube, video remains a savory market, with 3/4 of US internet users streaming at least least 2.5 hours worth of video in May.

As of July, Flickr ranked the #2 photo site behind MySpace's PhotoBucket.

Link to Marketing VOX Article

Nissan Tunes Up For Yahoo Music Launch

by Karl Greenberg, Tuesday, Jul 24, 2007 7:00 AM ET

NISSAN IS TUNING UP FOR the launch of its Rogue compact crossover this September with a summer interactive campaign with Yahoo Music. The program ties in with Nissan Live Sets On Yahoo Music, a program launched late last year that uses Yahoo as a platform to webcast Nissan-sponsored concerts held on a Nissan-branded sound stage in Fox's studio lot in Los Angeles. The Rogue pre-launch program, "Ultimate L.A. Rogue Trip," centers on a concert on the sound stage by Carlos Santana and others. The program, via ePrize, dangles an all-expenses-paid trip for two to see Santana perform live at Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo Music. Melissa Adams, senior manager, Nissan Media, says the company is boosting its Internet marketing efforts--and that, in fact, the Rogue campaign will be Nissan's largest-ever online campaign. She says Nissan's campaign with Yahoo Music has boosted brand image and trustworthiness, as well as purchase consideration. "Interactive will have a large presence for the Rogue launch," she says, adding that Nissan Live Sets will be a central component to the young-skewing effort for the car, whose target demo for Rogue is 20s to early 30s. "Nissan Live Sets is definitely here to stay. We're in month eight, and will be continuing into year two." She says, to date, Nissan has streamed 50 million videos of Nissan Live Sets videos through Yahoo Music to about 6 million people. "The vehicles we have used for the quarterly promotions--Altima and now Rogue--have seen the most benefit in terms of lead generation, but, overall, we've seen great metrics even during non-promotional months," she says. The performances feature artists in hip hop, pop, R&B, country, Latin and other genres. They have included Tony Bennett, American Idol-alumna Kelly Clarkson, Joss Stone, Avril Lavigne, Beck and Enrique Iglesias. Link to MediaPost Article

LinkedIn Traffic Up 323% in One Year

The market share of US visits to LinkedIn was up 323% in the past year (week ended 7/7/07 vs. week ended 7/8/06), and up 17% in the past four weeks alone (week ended 7/7/07 vs. week ended 6/8/07), according to Hitwise.

As of last week, LinkedIn ranked No. 23 in the Hitwise Employment and Training category, writes Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott.

Interestingly, LinkedIn users are much more apt to be using Gmail than the online population as a whole, according to Hitwise.

As of last week, Yahoo Mail led over Gmail in market share of total US visits by more than 10 to 1, but the amount of upstream traffic from Yahoo Mail that Linked In receives is just three times that of Gmail, according to Prescott.

That relationship can be seen by examining these two charts side by side:

“It appears that LinkedIn still has early adopter appeal, just as Gmail does, and is poised for even greater growth as the word gets out,” concludes Prescott.

Link to Marketing Charts Article