16 March 2009 | Author: L. Sutherland Head of Media Content

Yahoo!'s got its eye on the box

So far, 2009 has seen Yahoo! attempting to assert itself as a company with its eye on the future. New CEO Carol Bartz got the ball rolling immediately after her appointment mid-January, blowing away company cobwebs by shaking up the management structure and being surprisingly candid about Yahoo!'s future plans at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference.

Additionally, at the end of February, Yahoo! let fly the plan for its new brand of search advertising - one that integrates images and videos in paid listings.

This month sees the forward thinking search engine implementing a new web video strategy. The New York Times reports that Yahoo!'s executives claim that, by not competing directly with TV, they have created a sustainable model for original online video content.

Way back in the middle of this decade, Yahoo! had big plans for online video and were starry-eyed about the idea of TV-style programmes for the internet. But its forays into the genre didn't go as planned and were scrapped back in 2006. The search company didn't stop its efforts completely though - instead, it quietly continued to produce low key web shows and act as a distributor for other media companies.

According to the New York Times, Sibyl Goldman, the head of entertainment for Yahoo!, admitted that the previous model might not have been primed for success. She said: "We may have come at it from the wrong way in the previous era."

So the company has reversed its thinking - instead of creating shows in a way akin to traditional TV - i.e. making something the company thought was good and expecting public opinion to follow - Yahoo! is now building new content around the biggest audiences.

The coming weeks will see new offerings from the company in the shape of shows like "Spotlight to Nightlight" - short spots about celebrity mothers born from the traffic spikes surrounding celebrity baby names and photos. This strategy allows Yahoo! to play on its strengths as the search engine mines its own data to produce the types of shows that people are searching for.

With videos on technology developments on its finance site and sports sites boasting game highlights, it's clear that Yahoo! is intent on playing its cards right this time. This has the potential to become a highly lucrative move as the web video markets matures and comes into its own in online advertising - an industry always looking for the next big technological breakthrough. If Yahoo! can recruit more sponsors in the shape of Verison Wireless and State Farm, supporters of Yahoo!'s new offerings, Yahoo! could soon be inciting ratings wars amongst its competitors.

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