In my mind Yahoo is missing a huge opportunity to wield influence over the blogosphere. Yahoo’s front page generates hundreds of thousands of clicks a second. When Buzz was on the front page, it would push some of those clicks off to third party sites that earned their way to the top. Now it sounds like a brilliant way to suck traffic from Yahoo and push on to blogs, but that’s because Yahoo doesn’t make any money once the user leaves. That’s because Yahoo isn’t advertising on those sites.
Yahoo could fix the problem by leveraging their existing ad network into the blogosphere with the added carrot of Yahoo’s home page traffic. Worried about getting those users back? Well, similar to the way Yahoo pushes users to their news property, Yahoo could “suggest” blogs use MyBlogLog to enhance their community. The MyBlogLog widget could link back to other Yahoo related content or suggested links from MBL friends.
In a way, Yahoo could create a “platform” of sorts for content creators, that would reward top content producers with traffic, money, and engagement. At the same time bloggers remain free agents with a strong incentive to grow their businesses.
While I don’t have exact stats on the size of the market, Federated Media raised $50 milion on a $200 million post. They also did $23 million in business last year with $60 million in rev slated for this year. Certainly those kinds of revenues coming from a relatively short list of blogs are enough to motivate a new business.
