I now have learned why some of the traffic I used to get on Webmetricsguru.com, I don’t get anymore - Don Dodge broke the news to me today ; All the nice commentaries I used to get due to Know More Media’s partnership with PRWEB feeding blog news directly in Yahoo News commentary - (which got picked up as Blog Commentaries on News Searches)- appears to be no more. Yahoo News killed the feature.
In fact, I had even done a study last month on how I picked up FireWorks traffic on the 4th of July from Yahoo News by posting about Fireworks displays on the afternoon of July 4th. The actual post I did on July 4th was this one: FireWork Shows and Buzz on the 4th of July. The Yahoo traffic I got made this down-loadable study - Download my Fireworks Traffic Study file.
Now, was it unfair of Yahoo to put my Fireworks posting as News……..?
Ok, I’m supposed to say Yes ….they were right to get rid of it and put it somewhere else.
But part of me whats to say, No, Yahoo should have left the blog commentary in the Yahoo News. I mean, it was commentary - it was on the far right and it was labeled as being from blogs - it was in no way implying that the information in the right side of the page was news - it was - commentary - blog news. Yes, I benefited from it, KMM benifited from it, but Yes, it was a way to differentiate from Google and MSN, which did not do the same thing.
It goes back to my post to day on What’s Expected - if people have the expectation that a News Search Engine is only about News - then that’s what they see. Yahoo had 3 choices, Yahoo could Embrace the expectation of the News Search Engine idea - that News is just News - nothing else (what Don Dodge said should happen and did happen).
Or, Yahoo could have Changed the Perception of News - which they began by doing - until they "caved in". Or Yahoo could have just Defied all the critics and did what it wanted and just create something new, maybe a hybrid news service - and see if people would buy into it.
The problem that happens by caving in - as Yahoo did - is there’s no reason for me to want to use Yahoo News - it’s clearly the same stuff that Google News and MSN News is putting out - why bother to look at it at all?
If your going to be just like everyone expects you to be (Seth Godin’s first choice) - you better be prepared to wait on line to get my visit to your news site - because I have no compelling reason to use your Yahoo News Service - I might as just use any of them - they’re all pretty much the same, right?
