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Yesterday, Yahoo launched its social news site Yahoo! Buzz. It has immediately been labeled a Digg clone, but the one major difference is that all the stories will not be user submitted, but instead, they will be selected from a set of pre-approved publishers. The list of publishers will include both large news sources and niche blogs.
The buzz rating of a particular story will then be determined by a combination of users clicking on the “buzz up” button next to the story, as well as search patterns and trends. This may not generate the same variety of stories that are found on sites like Digg, but it will probably help weed out stories that are obviously spam.
Each day a few of the top Yahoo! Buzz stories will make it to the Yahoo’s main page. This would mean huge traffic boosts for any of these sites. While testing, Yahoo reported that a wired.com story it had promoted to its homepage, generated over 2 million unique hits in 2 hours.
It will be interesting to see if Yahoo! can find a winning formula in its selection of pre-approved publishers, user voting and search patterns. It is a combination of all three of these factors that will ultimately define what content appears on Yahoo! Buzz. And in the end, it will be the quality of this content that will determine whether people will choose to visit and participate in Yahoo’s latest experiment.
What should be of interest to internet marketers, is figuring out how to benefit from some of the traffic Yahoo! Buzz will likely generate. One way to do this, would be to become a pre-approved publisher. But since it appears that only very well known sites with significant traffic like Ars Technica, Boing Boing, and The Huffington post will dominate this list, it may be very hard to get on this list. Another option would be to study the list of pre-approved publishers and through online PR techniques get some of these pre-approved publishers talking and linking to you in their stories.
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