First thing Monday morning Yahoo and ABC News announced a new distribution deal — familiar stuff, albeit between two big partners. It will encompass gems from the TV network's global news and politics coverage, involve the broadcast anchors and star correspondents, include original online content, inspire the occasional collaboration, all served up directly to Yahoo's massive audience on desktops and mobile devices everywhere.
At a press conference Yahoo's Ross Levinsohn and ABC News' Ben Sherwood touted the huge online readership of Yahoo.com, repeatedly mentioning the portal's 25 million daily and 100 million monthly visitors. "That reach can't be replicated in any other medium," Levinsohn said.
But a funny thing happened just before the Yahoo/ABC press conference: AOL's The Huffington Post released its monthly traffic numbers, showing 37 million unique visitors in September and over one billion page views.
That's still less than half of Yahoo's 100 million monthly users. But remember: nobody goes to HuffPo to check e-mail or search the web. All those hits are news related.
The Huffington Post also announced it was launching four new sites: Huff/Post50 (a site for boomers), HuffPost Gay Voices, HuffPost Weddings, and HuffPost High School, making a staggering 21 new verticals since HuffPo and AOL merged in March.
On top of that, HuffPo snapped up Localocracy, a Massachusetts-based civic engagement and local politics platform. Localocracy's founders are joining up with HuffPo's broader Media Group to take that community magic national. HuffPo also wooed away the New York Times' Lisa Belkin, who will have a blog/column covering parenting, work/life balance and family.
Like Yahoo News, HuffPo is trying to win web users with a mix of high-value and community-created content. With Yahoo's ABC partnership and HuffPo's existing readership, both sites are also targeting the same content categories (political coverage and lifestyle news) and demographic group: a mainstream audience that skews older, female and middle-class.
HuffPo's new verticals double down on this core readership even as they ever-so-slightly extend it. Call it the Expanded Facebook demographic.
Continue reading Yahoo, ABC, HuffPo, ESPN: How Do You Run A News Portal?...
Yahoo and HuffPo are both betting that politics will be a big driver of continued traffic as we go into 2012, and each positioning themselves to benefit from that upswing in interest. The Yahoo/ABC News partnership was announced on ABC's morning talk show Good Morning America, whose GoodMorningAmerica.com now redirects to gma.yahoo.com. The first major event will be a George Stephanopoulos interview with President Obama on Monday at 2:35 p.m. (EST), webcast live simultaneously on Yahoo.com and ABCNews.com, featuring questions submitted by readers of Yahoo! and ABCNews.com.
The trouble — or the opportunity, I guess, depending on how you look at it — is that when it comes to original coverage, politics and global news has never been Yahoo's strong point, nor has digital distribution been ABC News'. Even though both Yahoo's Levinsohn and ABC's Sherwood tried to present the alliance as a great synergy between popular news brands, it's hard not to see it as two outlets working hard to prop each other up. If Yahoo and ABC can plug each other's holes, both can stay afloat.
A Yahoo/ABC alliance that actually leveraged both partners' strengths could be fascinating. Yahoo has one of the best online sports news teams and most popular sports portals going — just see their amazing coverage of the ongoing corruption surrounding the University of Miami's football team from August. ABC, in turn, could offer Yahoo and its base in digital advertising a more meaningful expansion into web television than just web videos from ABC's news team.
The problem is that ABC News — or rather its parent company, Disney — has ESPN. ABC Sports, the division that brought us Monday Night Football and The Wide World of Sports, doesn't even exist any more: All of its sports coverage, whether in broadcast or online, is handled by its giant cable sister company.
So synergy around sports is flat off the table. When asked about Yahoo! Sports in the context of the ABC agreement, Yahoo's Levinsohn and ABC's Sherwood dodged the question, walking it back to ABC and Yahoo's content-sharing partnership for this summer's UK royal wedding.
Yahoo, in turn, despite flirting with buying Hulu this year and writing software for net-connected TVs from Samsung and Toshiba going back to 2009, doesn't really seem to have TV on its radar anymore.
I asked Levinsohn and Sherwood whether they had any plans to bring their new jointly produced content to digital TVs, set-top boxes or consoles, or any of the other usual places people tend to watch digital video. Both deferred, saying only that they were open to expanding the agreement — "anything is possible," Levinsohn said — but they were currently focused on web and mobile. Either they're extremely coy, or it hadn't actually occurred to them to try to bring new digital TV content to television sets. Like, you know, ESPN would.
So, constrained by those parameters, ABC and Yahoo are both left chasing The Huffington Post — a fast-growing, web-native and increasingly multimedia-savvy and professional-journalism-driven site, built around political news, which has increasingly become a combination of Good Morning America and Yahoo.com for the new Expanded Facebook generation.
In fact, ABC News tried a version of this at least once before in the run up to an election year, partnering with Facebook in 2007. I don't recall that setting the world on fire. Nor did Yahoo and ABC News' similar announcement of a new partnership all the way back in 2000.
My friend Andrew Fitzgerald has some experience with blending TV news with web content, both for Current TV and Al Jazeera English. "The ABC-Yahoo deal seems like two wrong ways trying to find a right way," he wrote on Twitter. "In my experience people do not love watching news packages online."
"I feel like ABC-Yahoo! is a deal that traveled through time from 2006 to haunt us in the present," he added.
ABC and Yahoo both have terrific resources, and both have a strong incentive to make this work. It would be unwise to count either of them out. Also, the only web company more dysfunctional than Yahoo may be HuffPo's parent AOL, which could self-combust at any moment, and whose CEO Tim Armstrong might actually wish he were running Yahoo instead.
But with 2012 approaching, and Yahoo and ABC News squaring off firmly against the Huffington Post, on Arianna's turf and terms? I'm not sure I like where this is headed.
See Also:
- Rumor: AOL’s Tim Armstrong Wants to Merge With Yahoo
- Gossip Folks: A Fierce Fight for What’s Left of Yahoo
- What’s Yahoo Really Worth?
- Three Lessons From Two Months of Tech-Sector Madness
- Huffpo’s Post-AOL Future
- Veteran Journos Out as AOL-Huffington Cuts 900 Jobs
- Why The New York Times Will Lose to The Huffington Post
- Facebook Inks Deal With ABC News Like It’s 1999
