More on Mayfly Content
February 1st, 2007
Ars Technica, Battelle’s Searchblog, TechCrunch, GigaOm, and Techdirt have all weighed in on Yahoo’s “brand universes” — a topic that I touched on back in November as The Internet called: it wants its pageviews back.
Other than my (well, PaidContent’s) two-month jump on the story, the big news here is the reading of this move. Where my response was “hey, this could be something interesting,” the folks linked above don’t seem to share very much of my optimism.
So why are these “brand universes” interesting? In the seamonkeyrodeo post linked above, I characterized Yahoo’s project (and MTV’s similar undertaking) as “mayfly content” efforts: attempts to focus on quick creation of Webspace about the topics that are getting traffic on the Web right now. Rather than building big, complex sites and then trying to drive traffic to them after the fact, you get the content up there quickly, using the smallest possible amount of your own resources — and you build knowing full well that traffic is likely to drop off precipitously as the target topic falls out of fashion.
While this would clearly be a supplement to, not a replacement for, longer-term Web strategies, it’s an interesting mindset: we know that traffic on the web is highly volatile, so what happens if we try to monitor and respond to those changes, rather than trying so hard to direct the traffic?
The list of brands that’s been released so far does give me some pause, though. A big part of what’s interesting about this approach is that it’s explicitly reactive: with del.icio.us, flickr, and its other components, Yahoo has access to a lot of information about what’s getting traffic now, and success for this sort of approach depends more on using that information to decide what to focus on right now than on the actual “user generated content” that flickr et al provide. A brand site based on Lost? Feels to me like the elapsed time between deciding what to build and actually building it is far too long here.
As Techdirt pointed out, this approach shares some of the DNA of splogs; this is true, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing…exactly. With Yahoo using content to which it has legitimate access, the biggest shared attribute is the goal: to track what’s popular now and provide content on those topics as quickly and easily as possible. Where the Web (including and especially blogs) largely takes the puritan approach (work hard, build an audience, profit), this mayfly content approach explicitly seeks to eliminate step one of that process. That may or may not be “right,” but it’s interesting, and I still believe that it has the potential to make money for Yahoo.
And whether I’m right or wrong on this, the “mayfly content” coinage grabbed at least one other person, so I can’t argue with that…though you did snake the top Google spot for mayfly content from me, Eric.
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