Metz, The Social Concept

2009 Predictions For Yahoo's Social Web Properties

November 24, 2008

I had planned to write another posting today on MySpace’s Data Availability, but I’m going to have to hold that for tomorrow.

Yesterday morning, I was hanging out at Chris Heuer’s (Social Media Club) Social Sunday breakfast, and I ran into an acquaintance who’s a designer at Yahoo. I couldn’t get over the fact that this young person, for the first time in a great while, was working at a company that might just have a fighting chance on the social web, especially now that the Microsoft and Google deals have gone down the tubes. And that’s really interesting, because Yahoo has gotten to where they are without building a single best-in-class service (e.g. search, web app, etc.)

Even though Yahoo’s ticker price is at it’s lowest point since 2003, the company holds a number of promising social web properties. Here’s what I think will happen to these properties, over the next six months.

flickr

• The Stats: Usage is at an all-time high, but in comparison to a property that had a similar-sized photo inventory one year ago (Facebook, MySpace), monthly unique visitor count is much lower, and destination social networks are now holding photo inventories 5-10x greater than flickr’s. Attention on the property seems to be constant-to-improving, but it’s a consistently less engaging property than youth-oriented photo site Photobucket, or even the uber-consumer photo site Kodak Gallery, whose traffic is routinely dwarfed by flickr.
• The Prediction: As long as they can keep adding solid new features (e.g. tight Facebook integration, geotagging) and keep their API extensible and flexible, I predict modest growth for flickr in Q1 and Q2, and their monthly traffic should pass the 30-32M mark sometime in the near future. This means that they may just barely crack the Top 20 English language websites some time in 2009. Robust syndication can only help this. Associated Press Newspaper integration, anyone?

Yahoo Buzz

• The Stats: While it’s hardly a Digg – killer, Yahoo’s Buzz has certainly lapped Reddit (and even micro-blogs like Twitter) in a relatively short period of time. Although the content seems to be more mainstream than Digg’s, Buzz seems to be able to maintain a longer time-on-site, at this point, and their climb, since summer 2008, has surpassed Digg’s routine 2:30 visit by about one minute
• The Prediction: As long as content stays as engaging (and mainstream) as it is now, Buzz should be doing numbers about double Reddit’s monthly traffic (7M) by February 2009. Digg may want to consider a more heterogenous content offering now, rather than having to double-back to do this at a later time. If the growth curve continues, Digg could be looking at a direct competitor by early 2010. Syndication/integration deals with large partners (e.g. Business Week, etc.) could be very good moves at this time.

Yahoo Open Strategy

• The Stats: After Yahoo shuttered their Yahoo Mash service back in August (largely imitative of Facebook/MySpace), many analysts in the space wondered where they could go with any social strategy. In typical Yahoo fashion, they were also carrying a similar-looking property at the time, Yahoo 360. Over the past two years, Yahoo has shut down three or four “duplicate” properties (e.g. Yahoo Photos vs. flickr, etc.). Yahoo Profiles now features a “ universal profile “ offering, but usage is looking flat. Normally, when a strategy has a well-known acronym, I’d refer to it in a blog post. Perhaps Y!OS is well-known in the developer community, but I know a lot of developers, and I’ve never heard of it.
• The Prediction: I do not forsee Yahoo’s Open Strategy leading to big gains in making Yahoo a social portal in Q1/Q2 2009. If Yahoo truly seeks to be a player on the social web, they’re going to need to allow for some sort of network profile portability from existing social networks. Although Yahoo has talked about their “ massive, latent social network “ for about a year, I’m unconvinced that CTO Ari Balogh has the resources to waken this “sleeping giant” without the assistance of an existing identity platform that’s widely adopted (e.g. Facebook or similar 100M+ community). Perhaps a partnership deal that would allow a really large social network to deeply leverage the Yahoo Search API could yield big rewards here.

del.icio.us

• The Stats: Although social bookmarking service Delicious’ numbers are just as high as the next brand in social bookmarking, it’s still a niche offering. Social bookmarking is simply a social technology that has only caught on with 10-15% of the population, and I do not see a reason that these numbers will change by more than 1-2% in Q1-Q2 of 2009.
• The Prediction: To fully integrate social media into the Yahoo brand, it may be wise to fold Delicious’ offering wholly into the Yahoo platform, and give it tight integration with Yahoo Buzz. Perhaps they can integrate Yahoo Purple into the Delicious logo, and removing the old brand name? I don’t think the brand equity will mean much to the million people who know how to use Delicious, and possibly integrating it into the brand more fully will convince another million people that it’s not (too) difficult to use.

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