Seven Network's announcement that it's Yahoo joint venture is undertaking yet another restructure not only points to a strategic shift in its operations but may also be a portent for the future of general media-based portals.
Last week Yahoo7's acting chief executive Rohan Lund, was reported to have presented yet another new strategy to arrest the site's declining fortunes as it continues to loose market share. The new strategy sees Yahoo7 abandoning what has been described as a "relentless advertising focus", to concentrate on both news and search as it seeks to oust Google as Australia's leading search engine.
According to reports in The Australian, the strategy is designed to do "anything to drive traffic to the portal" with Lund quoted as saying that the portal aimed to be home page for every Australian going online.
It's both a fairly naive assertion and a blind strategic assumption that against an ever changing landscape, Yahoo7 believes it can arrest the near 80% consumer and advertiser drawing power of Google.
And it's a lesson that Lund would do well to learn from his similarly well meaning predecessors.
For example, I've been online long enough to remember (and use) portals such as Apple's eWorld (see pic), Netscape, Lycos and Excite. All of which, except for eWorld, still exist in some form or another but whose drawing power in this market is either non-existent or negligible.
Hitwise, an internet ranking company who's data is based on market share of visits from a sample of nearly 3 million Internet users in Australia most recently ranked Yahoo7 in 10th place with just .9% of total Australian traffic.
This compares to Goggle's first place with a total share of nearly 10% of Australian traffic followed by 9MSN's meagre but significant 2.6%. Also in the top 10 is Myspace (2.17%), Hotmail (1.85%), Ebay (1.85%), Facebook (1.11%) and Youtube (0.95%)
Based on these figures theYahoo7 strategy has an uphill battle to overcome the status quo on both internet news and search.
And while some of its free-to-air news market dominance may also rub off on the online new service, what about the other Network 7 content and its ability to bring traffic and point of difference to the site?
Network 7's digital strategy is lagging behind both the ABC and Network 10 on areas such as after telecast access to immediate downloads. Downloading is becoming a huge threat to all Australian television networks as viewers become time shifters (as we have noted previously, even US television audience measurement is now done on the basis of total viewer ship including time shifting) and overall television viewing continues to decline.
It will be interesting to see if 7's Tivo marketing announcement is somehow bound into the notion of on-line content and directing free-to-air and subscription traffic flow, but right now it's fairly light on detail.
Further, the Yahoo and 7 team could flounder for the very reasons predecessors like Excite did. In 2001 former Excite founder William Hearst III, described the demise of the portal this way:
"The strategy was to build a national brand that could compete against AOL. To the extent that we spent money pursuing that strategy, which may not have
been the right strategy, perhaps, but to the extent that we spent money chasing that strategy, " Hearst said.
"One of the lessons--and I hate to say it--is that you can gain a tremendous advantage by partnering with big, well-established companies, and people are
going to continue to do that. But those companies are going to find it very difficult to put their new start-up venture ahead of their own corporate responsibilities. So when you have a start-up controlled by big, established companies, it's going to be a little different than a real, stand alone start-up."
And this is really the conundrum for Yahoo7. When the joint venture was announced in December 2006, it was widely anticipated by joint venture chairman John Marcom that it was "in a prime position to capitalise as viewers change the way they consume television programmes."
But since then Yahoo7 has been slow to move and perhaps its unwise pursuit of Google, Fairfax and 9MSN underpins how wrong footed it has been.
Interestingly, as Hearst notes, perhaps it's no longer the case that the nation's leading television company no longer needs Yahoo to be its digital arm and that going out as a real stand alone company (in much the same way Fairfax has) and building its own identifiable set of online brands and services from its massive content base should be re-examined.
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