Yahoo! Voices

Last updated

Yahoo! Voices, formerly Associated Content (AC), was a division of Yahoo! that focused on online publishing. Yahoo! Voices distributed a large variety of writing through its website and content partners, including Yahoo! News. In early December 2011, its owners Yahoo! announced a major shakeup involving the introduction of a new service, Yahoo! Voices, which would replace the Associated Content site and take on the bulk of its content, while some 75,000 items would be retired under the new site's more stringent content submission rules. On July 2, 2014, Yahoo! announced that it would be shutting down Yahoo! Voices on July 31, 2014 and the Yahoo! Contributor Network at the end of August 2014. [1]

Contents

History

Associated Content was started in January 2005 by Luke Beatty. They hired their CTO in March 2006, Sonu Kansal. It was based in Denver, Colorado, with business development, sales and community offices in New York City.

In April 2009, Associated Content hired a new CEO, Patrick Keane, formerly of CBS Interactive and Google [2] and closed a $6 million Series C round of funding from SoftBank Capital and Canaan Partners. [3] Three weeks after the funding announcement, Associated Content reorganized and laid off 5 employees. [4]

On May 18, 2010, Yahoo! announced that it would purchase Associated Content for $100 million. [5]

On December 1, 2011, Yahoo! announced a new service, Yahoo! Voices, which "replaces Associated Content as Yahoo! Contributor Network's official digital library". [6] In announcing the new service, Yahoo! claimed more stringent submission guidelines would be used in accepting new content and that the company would delete over 75,000 pieces that they deemed to be "inactive and outdated". [6] The new service aimed to provide "more than two million pieces of original content, spanning thousands of different topics, created by more than 500,000 individual experts and enthusiasts". [6]

Yahoo! announced on July 2, 2014 that it would shut down Yahoo! Voices and Yahoo! Contributor Network on July 31, 2014. [7]

The Internet Archive is integrating deleted Yahoo! Voices content into the Wayback Machine. [8]

Publishing platform

In addition to text content (articles), AC featured categories for video, audio, and slide shows along with an online community where users shared their expertise, network and voice opinions.

In contrast to many content publishing sites, AC paid many users for content up front. [9] Articles were usually required to be at least 400 words. Pictures were acceptable if from approved sources. The "Assignment Desk" was another source of article ideas and income for writers. AC displayed predefined article titles and users could "claim" the assignment. All on-site assignments (as opposed to "Partner Assignments") paid performance-based revenue while some also offered up-front payment. [10] Content could also be submitted without an up-front payment. All articles written by users who agreed to the contract were eligible to receive payments based on the number of page views. [11]

AC sometimes sent work back to contributors for further editing and sometimes rejected work for violations of the site's terms of use and guidelines, including promotional or advertorial content and plagiarism. [12] [13]

Motifs

Associated Content originally billed itself as "The People's Media Company". The original schema was linked to its idea that its writers (originally called "Content Producers") were "Citizen Journalists".[ citation needed ]

In early 2009, Associated Content rebranded itself on the site as "Information from the source". Writers on the site, formerly called "Content Producers", were eventually called "Contributors" (after briefly being dubbed "Sources").[ citation needed ] The "Citizen Journalist" motif was dropped.[ citation needed ]

Criticism

Associated Content was criticized for the quality of its content. Slate technical writer Farhad Manjoo summed up this criticism thus: "Associated Content stands as a cautionary tale for anyone looking to do news by the numbers. It is a wasteland of bad writing, uninformed commentary, and the sort of comically dull recitation of the news you'd get from a second grader." [14] Scott Rosenberg criticized Associated Content and other companies for publishing content not aimed at human readers, but for the purpose of influencing search engines, [15] and for actually degrading Google Search results. [16] Independent blogger Lenin Nair also criticized the remuneration policies of Associated Content. [17]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AIM (software)</span> Instant messaging service

AIM was an instant messaging and presence computer program created by AOL, which used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LiveJournal</span> Russian social networking service

LiveJournal, stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yahoo! Inc. (1995–2017)</span> American technology company

The original incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. was an American multinational technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early internet era in the 1990s. Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, served as CEO and President of Yahoo from 2012 until June 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Friendster</span> Social gaming site

Friendster was a social network game based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. Later, the company became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages, and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original social networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gmail</span> Email service provided by Google

Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide making it the largest email service in the world. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or through the official mobile application. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and IMAP protocols.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flickr</span> Image and video hosting website

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. It has changed ownership several times and has been owned by SmugMug since April 20, 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jajah</span> VoIP provider

Jajah was a VoIP provider, founded by Austrians Roman Scharf and Daniel Mattes in 2005. The Jajah headquarters was located in Mountain View, CA, USA, and Luxembourg. Jajah maintained a development centre in Israel. On 23 December 2009, it was announced that Jajah had been bought by Telefónica through its subsidiary Telefónica Europe. In December 2013, Telefónica announced that Jajah would shut down at the end of January 2014.

RhythmOne plc, previously known as Blinkx, and also known as RhythmOne Group, is an American digital advertising technology company that owns and operates the web properties AllMusic, AllMovie, and SideReel.

Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. Questions were organised into categories with multiple sub-categories under each to cover every topic users may ask questions on, such as beauty, business, finance, cars, electronics, entertainment, games, gardening, science, news, politics, parenting, pregnancy, and travel. The number of poorly formed questions and inaccurate answers made the site a target of ridicule.

Shutterstock is an American provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools; it is headquartered in New York. Founded in 2003 by programmer and photographer Jon Oringer, Shutterstock maintains a library of around 200 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with around 10 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing. Originally a subscription site only, Shutterstock expanded beyond subscriptions into a la carte pricing in 2008. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012.

Yahoo! started at Stanford University. It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". The Guide was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed "Yahoo!". The word "YAHOO" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GameFAQs</span> Video game website

GameFAQs is a video gaming website that hosts guides and other resources, as well as an active message board forum. It was created in November 1995 by Jeff Veasey and has been owned by Fandom, Inc. since October 2022; its current editor is Allen "SBAllen" Tyner.

Justin.tv was a website created by Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt in 2007 to allow anyone to broadcast video online. Justin.tv user accounts were called "channels", like those on YouTube, and users were encouraged to broadcast a wide variety of user-generated live video content, called "broadcasts".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ovi (Nokia)</span> Former Internet services by Nokia

Ovi by Nokia was the brand for Nokia's Internet services. The Ovi services could be used from a mobile device, computer or via the web. Nokia focused on five key service areas: Games, Maps, Media, Messaging and Music. Nokia's aim with Ovi was to include third party developers, such as operators and third-party services like Yahoo's Flickr photo site. With the announcement of Ovi Maps Player API, Nokia started to evolve their services into a platform, enabling third parties to make use of Nokia's Ovi services.

The following is a timeline of events of Yahoo!, an American web services provider founded in 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tumblr</span> Microblogging and social networking website

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs. Bloggers can also make their blogs private. For bloggers, many of the website's features are accessed from a "dashboard" interface. As of March 2023, Tumblr hosts more than 572 million blogs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Examiner.com</span> Former news website

Examiner.com was an American news website based in Denver, Colorado, that operated using a network of "pro-am contributors"' for content. It had various local editions with contributors posting city-based items tailored to 238 markets throughout the United States and parts of Canada in two putative national editions, one for each country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fandom (website)</span> Wiki hosting service and domain

Fandom is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics. The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.

A content farm or content mill, is a company that employs large numbers of freelance writers, or AI tools to generate a large amount of textual web content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines, known as SEO. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views, as first exposed in the context of social spam.

References

  1. ↑ Rossiter, Jay (July 2, 2014). "Furthering Our Focus". Yahoo! . Retrieved October 7, 2014– via Tumblr.
  2. ↑ Vascellaro, Jessica E. (March 30, 2009). "Start-up Hires CBS, Google Veteran". The Wall Street Journal . Retrieved July 22, 2022.
  3. ↑ Tartakoff, Joseph (April 28, 2009). "Associated Content Raises $6 Million In Third Round". paidContent . Archived from the original on January 25, 2010. Retrieved July 12, 2012.
  4. ↑ Ferreyra, Alex (May 7, 2009). "Industry Moves Round-Up: EMI, The Atlantic, Associated Content". paidContent . Archived from the original on August 10, 2009. Retrieved July 12, 2012.
  5. ↑ Lee, Edmund (May 18, 2010). "Yahoo Buys Associated Content for $100 Million". Ad Age . Archived from the original on December 31, 2013. Retrieved July 22, 2022.
  6. 1 2 3 "Introducing Yahoo! Voices". Yodel Anecdotal. December 1, 2011. Archived from the original on January 21, 2013.
  7. ↑ "FAQ: Questions on the shut down of voices.yahoo.com and contributor.yahoo.com". Yahoo! Contributor Network. Archived from the original on July 2, 2014. Retrieved July 22, 2022.
  8. ↑ Scott, Jason (August 7, 2014). "Archive Team: The Silenced Yahoo! Voices". Internet Archive . Retrieved July 22, 2022.
  9. ↑ Holmes, Elizabeth (March 3, 2009). "Selling Expertise On the Internet For Extra Cash". The Wall Street Journal . Retrieved July 22, 2022.
  10. ↑ "FAQ: Why can't I submit content for upfront payment review?". Associated Content. Archived from the original on March 7, 2008. Retrieved March 13, 2008.
  11. ↑ "FAQ: Performance Payments". Associated Content. Archived from the original on March 7, 2008. Retrieved March 13, 2008.
  12. ↑ Grier, Tish (March 26, 2007). "A 'middle man' for grassroots journalism?". Online Journalism Review . Archived from the original on February 24, 2008. Retrieved March 13, 2008.
  13. ↑ "FAQ: What is Associated Content's editorial policy?". Associated Content. Archived from the original on March 7, 2008. Retrieved March 13, 2008.
  14. ↑ Manjoo, Farhad (December 1, 2009). "AOL's Latest Dumb Business Plan". Slate . Archived from the original on December 24, 2009. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
  15. ↑ Rosenberg, Scott (December 14, 2009). "SEO mills: That's not fast food, it's bot fodder". Wordyard. Archived from the original on September 21, 2010. Retrieved August 22, 2010.
  16. ↑ Rosenberg, Scott (August 20, 2010). "Google News gets gamed by a crappy content farm". Salon.com . Archived from the original on August 23, 2010. Retrieved August 22, 2010.
  17. ↑ Nair, Lenin (May 25, 2008). "Unethical Business Practices by Associated Content (AC)". CuteWriting. Retrieved October 19, 2017– via Blogger.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.