Yahoo’s Woes

Here’s an article from Hollywood Reporter on Yahoo’s woes.

I still think Yahoo has some great assets, but it is doing a very poor job of leveraging them. Here are some levers I would focus on, to deliver Yahoo out of the muck:

(a) MyYahoo : Tying personalization with the in-house systems of advertisers could deliver tremendous value. As it stands, there is hardly any advantage offered to advertisers via MyYahoo.

(b) Segmentation : Identify the top 10 online target ad spend segments, and make sure Yahoo’s offering and value proposition in each is clear-cut and solid; then sell the hell out of those segment focused advertisers. If this needs acquisitions to fill some gaps, so be it.

(c) User Generated Content : Monetizing assets like Flickr is not that difficult, even if it’s a requirement to not offend and turn off the community. This is a must, to be accomplished ASAP. The audiences for Flickr and Del.icio.us in particular are very focused and highly valuable to certain types of advertisers. They need to be positioned & packaged right.

(d) YPN : Tremendous opportunity exists to monetize the blog networks leveraging Yahoo’s other assets. Needs to be reaped.

Notice, all these are advertising revenue based levers. Ad spend is not slowing down. Yahoo is. It is also leaving tons of money on the table on a daily basis!