Yahoo! and Google revamp news sites
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

Item

Facebook has been a credible access point for curated news for quite a while – see Nancy Davis Kho’s report here – and has recently, with its Facebook Connect launch, become an even more important sharer of content, including business information.   

No wonder then that Google News and Yahoo! News have felt the pressure to overhaul their sites and improve their content provision. As reported by TechCrunch yesterday, Yahoo!, to great fanfare, has announced a partnership or “News and Information Alliance” with ABC News, which marks a move away from aggregation towards premium, original content. Plans for the information alliance include creating “richer stories”, such as the online series of videos featuring ABC’s top anchors interviewing leading politicians. An interview with President Obama has already been streamed on Yahoo! News. As TechCrunch pointed out, with this new partnership, Yahoo! will also become a credible competitor to the likes of the Huffington Post and CNN. This premium content will be supported by advertising, so there are no plans at the moment to charge users.

At the same time, we learned from paidContent that Yahoo! is planning to launch its digital newsreader called Livestand in the US – originally announced back in February by the then CEO Carol Bartz. Livestand is seen as Yahoo!’s strategy for monetising news accessed via tablets.

All this comes while the vultures continue to circle around Yahoo!,described by many industry watchers as a troubled company. Reuters only yesterday reported that Alibaba, the Chinese online retailer, is interested in acquiring Yahoo! as a whole. Yahoo! has a 40% stake in Alibaba.

Google News meanwhile has also been undergoing a makeover. The UK site now includes a feature called "Editor’s Picks" which provides original content from selected publishers, such as the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Financial Times and Reuters amongst others: I counted 12 publishers which have so far partnered with Google in this venture.

Google has given the publishers control over the type of content they want to display – feature articles, graphs or photo slideshows, for example. Users who select specific items are taken straight to the publisher’s site, thereby ensuring that readers engage online with the original producers of the content. It was interesting to see the subscription-based Financial Times as part of this roster of publishers. Providing free high quality content is obviously seen as a worthwhile trade-off for attracting potential new subscribers.

« Blog