YAHOO 3.0

1. Business Model

Yahoo should become a platform that welds its separate assets into a single unit, fusing marketing with social media and streamlining its services to maximize user experience.

Everybody can open an account > private and commercial users.

Log in to your individual account. Once an account has been set up, the user can subscribe to channels for services provided > media, news, services, merchandise.

Holding an account will be free for private users; commercial users will be charged according to trade and traffic generated at Yahoo (plus basic fee for services). Yahoo will have its own integrated payment service, owned/patented by Yahoo to maximize its cut on trade and sales generated.

Channels/services provided for subscribing would be:

News

Entertainment

• Sports
• Movies / shows / video
• Music
• Games
• eBooks / comics / photography
• Lifestyle / health / fashion / housing / interior design
• Gossip / celebrities
• Astrology / advice

Legal Counsel & Insurance

• Search / agencies
• Blogs & forums

Educational

• Libraries
• Lectures / online courses
• Documentaries
• Science & research

Travel

• Reporting / photography
• Services / agencies
• Language courses online / local

Job Market

• Search / hiring; employers / employees
• Corporate / freelance / non-profit / government
• Pay rates / employer ratings (see glassdoor; perhaps take-over / merging?)

Real Estate

• Search & realtors
• Mortgage & financing
• Maintenance / repair / mover services

Health Care

• Search > doctors / clinics / services
• Nutrition / fitness
• Forum

Finances & Investing

• Services / blogs / ratings
• Wiki with explanations of terms, stocks, bonds etc.
• Brokers
• Forum

By combining the user’s personal account with employment and job search options a responsible online behavior will be encouraged. Including real estate, financing and legal counsel will be challenging in terms of legal and security issues.

Goal and purpose would be a simplifying and streamlining of Yahoo’s portfolio. Tumblr could serve as a platform, integrating Flickr and video/streamlining. Services for video and streaming of film, TV, music and educational content like tutorials will have to be acquired.

Unlike before, however, the assets acquired and held will be used to actively engage with users and create surplus value in improved and enhanced user experience.

2. Strategy

Negotiations with content providers (news organizations, publishers, film, TV and music corporations/distributors) as well as educational facilities (potentials for universities, language schools, science and research, libraries) will need to establish an optimized standard of format for content to unify and simplify services, reducing friction in workflows and distribution. Negotiations will be facilitated if partnerships with software providers, app developers and cloud services, open-source as well as locked, can be established.

Cross-channel business opportunities will be facilitated and increase traffic as well as trade / sales. For instance, a user’s travel reports and photographs may provide links to travel agencies and language courses, along with reviews. Educational channels/programs/services on foreign cultures can be linked and reviewed, as well as online training in professional/advanced photography, along with suppliers of gear and products.

The linking, however, should be an option for the user to choose and activate, making her/him responsible for who is being targeted with what product and services. The user’s activity of providing links, reviews and generating traffic/sales would be rewarded by Yahoo and by the businesses/services that profit from the user’s activity. This would turn the parasitic practice of harassing users with targeted cold advertising into a creative and participatory model that engages users and shares responsibility while at the same time rewarding them; a new level of the sharing economy.

Yahoo would compete directly with Apple (iTunes and TV), Google (YouTube, TV, music), Facebook (video and intellectual properties in general, advertising), Amazon (books, eBooks, music, TV, streaming), and LinkedIn (hiring / employment), but Yahoo would be taking the game to a new level.

Yahoo 3.0 would adapt Amazon’s concept as a retailer of merchandise to intellectual content, properties, and services of all kinds and formats. Revenue will be created by actual trade and traffic generated, instead of passive, parasitic revenue generated from targeting with cold advertising which only aggravates users and is next to inefficient in generating sales.

As with Amazon’s reader/user reviews, Yahoo’s users would be encouraged to review services, content, products they have interacted with. These reviews would be rewarded according to their usefulness to other users, thus allowing for the community to self-regulate and maintain its standards by applying a no-harassment, no-slander policy. For instance, businesses could reward users/customers for reviews and recommendations that actually drive sales, customers, visitors. They might grant bonuses or other privileges.

Acquisition of content/intellectual property should offer the choice of single user rights (consumer); the right to share once among the user’s direct followers — perhaps for a limited time with the option for the follower to acquire full ownership. As well as an advanced ownership that entitles the user to process and integrate the acquired content in other forms (blog, video, multi-media mash-up), differentiating again between private and commercial use.

Yahoo 3.0 employs social media’s self-generating snow-ball economics as Amazon does with its users’ reviews, and Twitter and Facebook do by deploying their user data to establish them as search engines. The more transparent Yahoo 3.0 is in its transactions, the easier it will be adopted as its advantages will be evident for everybody (a distinctive advantage over closed operations such as Apple).

Yahoo 3.0 would be a creative business model as it generates value for everybody involved and facilitates a better online experience for both users and businesses, and not at the expense of anyone but Yahoo’s competitors.

Yahoo’s email and search engine as well as financial services could be integrated. Businesses and entities that don’t contribute to the platform concept should be sold or shut down. A stripped down portfolio and a clear profile will be key to rebooting Yahoo as a new and different enterprise.

To merge the businesses of Yahoo and AOL, two not very successful operations without intriguing prospects for the future, in the faint hope the joint enterprise might manage to survive at however slim a margin would be a boring solution at best.

3. Pricing & Partnerships

Yahoo’s (and AOL’s) current business model relies on targeting users by exploiting the data collected on them; an annoying, intrusive and ineffective practice, worse than door-to-door sales people. Door-to-door sales people ring the bell and leave it to me whether I answer the door or not; online advertising climbs into my window and sits down on the desk in front of me.

Targeting users by the data collected on them is a parasitic business model; it’s neither innovative nor creative, but exploitative harassment. To win customers, businesses need to make them an offer they can’t refuse by offering a user experience that outdoes anything they can find elsewhere; this has been the rather obvious ‘secret’ of Amazon’s rise to dominance.

The user knows what he/she’s looking for, and we don’t appreciate being diverted. But if the platform provides me with everything I need and want, then I will stay with it and first go looking there for whatever I may need in the future.

For Yahoo 3.0 to gain traction co-operations with content providers (film, video, TV, music, news, publishers) must be negotiated for them to deliver their product in a variety of forms with distinct advantages over other platforms (iTunes, Amazon, YouTube) > more elaborate trailers; behind-the-scene footage; featurettes; free content related to the product chosen by the user; bonuses. To maximize workflow and increase positive user experience a standard of formats is necessary.

Yahoo 3.0 should offer leveraged pricing > one free account for small businesses and freelancers; established businesses charged a basic fee according to followers and traffic. And all businesses charged additionally according to trade done at Yahoo 3.0.

Key to Yahoo 3.0’s success will be user friendliness in account, sales and payment management as well as frictionless workflows, paired with the best possible security.

It will be a matter of making an offer no content provider can refuse; attractive not so much in pricing but in availability, accessibility and user friendliness for both consumers and providers. What makes the user happy will also make content providers and Yahoo happy. The only one unhappy will be Yahoo’s competitors.