The New York Times recently reported that Yahoo! is building 100 microsites around branded entertainment content. There is nothing mentioned in the piece about sports sites in general or team sites specifically, but I wonder, why not?
Here’s an excerpt.
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan. 30 — Yahoo said Tuesday that it planned to build individual Web sites around 100 entertainment “brands” this year that would pull together content from Yahoo’s sprawling array of online properties.
The effort, called Brand Universe, is intended to create online destinations that will draw large audiences around individual movies, television shows, bands, celebrities, games and other types of entertainment.
Vince Broady, head of games, entertainment and youth at Yahoo, said the company had a wealth of entertainment content, but finding the material about a specific attraction was not always intuitive.
“We don’t connect the dots for our users around those brands,” Mr. Broady said. “Brand Universe is designed to fix that problem. What we are really trying to do is create environments where fans of brands can hang out when they are online.”
The sites would also create windows where visitors could find out more about specific attractions and perhaps become fans, Mr. Broady said.
Here’s a screen shot of an early Yahoo! community built around the Nintendo wii
I like the concept. Yahoo! is an excellent content aggregator and content creator. Yahoo!’s audience is huge. The portal is number one or number two in overall traffic, depending on who’s statistics you believe, so any brand that gets a site built on Yahoo! is likely to see a big boost in awareness, adoption and (of course) site traffic.
Will NFL and Yahoo! connect the dots?
NFL and Yahoo have partnered before (Game Pass), so it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the NFL or certain teams are in line to be among the 100 brands targeted by Yahoo.
Yahoo! already has over 1,000 NFL fan user groups on its site, includnig 161 groups focusing on the Indianapolis Colts and its players.
At the same time, NFL is in the process of bringing Web production and content creation in-house, and I’m hearing rumors that the folks at 280 Park are planning to use technology from Fan Nation in the guts of the new nfl.com. This would seemingly lessen the likelihood of any content deal with Yahoo!, especially around fan generated content.
What I don’t like about Yahoo!
Yahoo! struggles with LOCAL. When you look at the Nintendo wii example, you can see that the content is very generic. Yahoo! is simply pumping its news and advertising content into the wii site, and making it look pretty. There really isn’t much there unless users begin to build around the Yahoo! core. It’s not much different than what Google does when it sells ads around search results. They’re planning to make money off repurposed content.
The users (fans) are the ones who will make the difference here.
Currently Yahoo!’s groups are disjointed. Of the 161 Colts fan groups, for example, none has over 400 members and there really is no thread that connects the various sub groups. A Colts microsite on Yahoo! might begin to change that. If fans decide that the Yahoo! platform is the place they want to live, then they’ll begin building on what Yahoo! started and attract their friends, traffic will increase and Yahoo! will make more money.
Even the NFL will struggle (I think) if it tries to build team-centric, fan platforms off nfl.com. While NFL.com gets huge traffic, the avid fans are most passionate about their teams. And team sites are where the rubber meets the road. Whatever personalization (of experience) takes place for the online NFL fan should happen at the team level.
That’s why we’re building My Colts Network.
While it is taking much longer than we thought it would, we do still plan to launch My Colts Net in the coming months. We’ve already got over 10,000 fans pre-registered for the new social networking platform, and while we don’t expect all of these fans to be active in the system, we do anticipate thousands of fans will participate in our beta, and we expect to learn a lot about what they really want in a social networking system.
In fact, we’ve already begun to learn.
Of the 10,000 pre-registered fans, 60% say that “behind the scenes access” is the thing they want most from their “membership” in the network. Creating personal profiles, uploading photos, blogging and connecting with friends all lagged behind “access” as the thing fans say the want most. Happily, inside access is something fans can ONLY get from the teams (and the players). So the “local” / team level is where the real action is.
Best of both worlds?
My hope is that we can work with the league, and even with sites like Yahoo! to combine our strengths and maximize this opportunity for ourselves and for our fans.
It sounds like Yahoo is still less about content than being a portal, which makes it a good fit for what you want to do. What if it were possible to use a generic game to help gain meaningful entry into MyColts? Start a game on the national/international level that finishes at your local site, in a relevant group to which that person could belong. I think you can be very creative about the quality of the experience along the way, but the guts effect is a search for a local group.