Yahoo Shuts Down Voices, Bid for Low Cost Content Fails

Yahoo has announced plans to shut down its Voices site effective July 30 and its Contributor network effective the end of August.

Originally bought by Yahoo for $100 million as Associated Content in 2012, the Voices site, and the Contributor Network which supplied it with writers, were sources of low cost content, what some would call a “content farm”.

But following Google’s Panda algorithm, which targeted and downgraded what Google considered low quality content, 75,000 articles were deleted, reports Matt McGhee of Search Engine Land.

The rest of the content was transferred to a new site called Voices. The site paid as little as $5 per article mostly in Performance Payments from ad revenue for crowdsourced content.

And some of these were the kinds of often-criticized posts with titles like “Guide to Reducing Stress in Daily Activity” or “Five Hollywood Career Revivals Waiting to Happen,” said Ad Age at the time of the purchase.

For online small business owners and content marketers the message seems clear. Mass produced, low cost content lacking a unique perspective will always lose out to carefully crafted and authoritative alternatives.

But this might tell only part of the story, says SEO expert Aaron Wall of SEO Book. In an email exchange with Small Business Trends, Wall admits confusion at Yahoo’s decision:

“Strategically I don’t understand the incentive for shutting down Yahoo Voice and the Yahoo Contributor Network. I see numerous benefits to keeping it around. They could have:
- used it as a source of the sort of backfill content to augment their featured content
- kept it segmented and used it to find new and upcoming authors
- kept it around to give them greater cost structure flexibility during economic downturns & allow them to scale up near peaks without embedding as high of a fixed cost structure in their business

Every publisher has to have some blend of featured content & lower cost backfill content. Yahoo! has recently pushed to launch their magazine-styled niche sites with partnerships with known journalists and celebrities.”

But in the end, Wall noted another possible reason for the decision: Yahoo’s purchase of social blogging site Tumblr in 2013 for $1 billion.

Wall explains:

“Another factor worth considering is how they are blending Tumblr into their site and their native ads strategy. Perhaps with Tumblr having a far bigger footprint they could try to recruit authors from it to write for some of their verticals.”

In a note to contributors of the Yahoo network, writers who wish to continue contributing user generated content to Yahoo are told:

“You are encouraged to publish via Tumblr, though please realize the Yahoo Contributor Network publishing and payment platform is not being replaced within the company.”

Yahoo Photo via Shutterstock

The post Yahoo Shuts Down Voices, Bid for Low Cost Content Fails appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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Bizapalooza Will Teach You to Get More Customers

Would you like to make more money with your small business? Of course, you would! So we’re pumped to tell you about an upcoming event that will teach you to do just that…and it’s absolutely free!

Ivana Taylor is Small Business Trends book editor and founder of Bizapalooza, a three day online event with free webinars for small businesses July 9, 10 and 11.

She says she came up with the idea for the event when a fellow consultant remarked:

“There are 28 million small businesses in this country, and if each of them would hire one employee, just think what an impact it would have.”

A look at the speaker’s page of the Bizapalooza website should get you psyched! You’ll see names like Robert Imbriale. He’ll show small business service providers and others how to use new media to do things like create video content that showcases your expertise.

Other speakers like Vanessa Simpkins will help small business owners learn more about how to have a sales conversation.

Still others like James Wirth of QuestionPro have companies that give small businesses feedback about what their customers want.

Sabrina Parsons of Palo Alto Software will talk about LivePlan, a market planning software that connects directly to Quickbooks and shows how to create a marketing plan that will make you money.

And Mike Telem, of Marketo, one of the event’s sponsors, will talk about how his company helps turn a site’s anonymous visitors into paying customers.

Other sponsors include SmallBizOpinions and Small Business Trends.

Take a look at the three day event’s agenda to determine which webinars interest you the most. And don’t worry if you can’t attend every session. Content will be available on the site for 48 hours after each individual session at no charge.

Taylor explains:

"It's the small business owner’s three day MBA…for free!"

Webinar Details

What: Bizapalooza

When: July 9, 10, and 11 (And on Demand)

Who: The event is being produced by Ivana Taylor and sponsored by Marketo, SmallBizOpinions and Small Business Trends

Where: Register here.

The post Bizapalooza Will Teach You to Get More Customers appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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Bing Gives Twitter Results Including Hashtags and Handles

Twitter results have been showing up on Bing for some time. But now the search engine is adding tools that will refine that search. And that could be good news, if people happen to be looking for your Twitter handle on Bing.

Bing has now introduced features that allow those using the service to look for a specific hashtag, (say, that really great Twitter chat you had last week, for example.)

They’ll also be able to search for individual Twitter handles and trending topics. In a post about the new service on the official Bing Blogs, the Bing Team explained:

“As you well know, people are generating millions of tweets every minute on every conceivable topic. Through our exclusive partnership with Twitter, we are rolling out a fast and intuitive way to discover tweets directly in our search results. Whether you are interested in looking up trending hashtag, specific Twitter profiles or the latest tweets about your favorite celebrities, we have you covered.”

Developers say several factors will figure into the ranking of a Twitter handle, hashtag or other content on Bing.

Those factors include a tweet’s popularity, what Bing calls its “freshness” (more on this later) and the authority or importance of the person doing the tweeting.

Among the “signals” the Bing team lists as helping to determine each of these factors are quality and again freshness. Here it appears that Bing plans to put more weight on a post with original content than on a retweet — which makes sense.

But then, in terms of discovering “popularity,” it would seem the number of times others retweet your original message is a factor.

Finally, information on your profile coupled with whether or not it is a “verified” account, will factor into the authority, both of your account and of your tweets.

Unfortunately, as implied at the end of the quote above, the focus of the new feature is mainly discussed from the standpoint of searching for celebrity and show biz related gossip. (Both Ashton Kutcher and “The Daily Show,” as seen above, are mentioned in the Bing Team’s post.)

As a result, it’s kind of hard to figure out how this will apply to searching for references to your business or brand on Bing.

Add to this the fact that, despite some interesting features, Bing continues to account for only a fraction of online search.

On the other hand, having handles and hashtags as a preference in a search other than Twitter’s creates more options. It should make small business Twitter users rethink the importance of their accounts and hashtags for marketing and branding.

The post Bing Gives Twitter Results Including Hashtags and Handles appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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Samsung Electronics says second quarter profit likely down 24.5 percent; worst in two years

SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd on Tuesday said operating profit likely fell 24.5 percent in April-June, its lowest in two years due to slowing growth in the company's cash cow smartphone business and the strength of the South Korean won.

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U.S. pushes China to give ground on technology trade deal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Monday urged China to give ground on a deal to eliminate duties on billions of dollars of technology products and said it would use talks in Beijing later this week to push to restart negotiations.

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Twitter appoints Katie Stanton global media chief: source

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Twitter Inc has appointed Katie Stanton its new media chief, placing the former Google executive at the heart of its crucial relationships with Hollywood and the global media industry, a source with knowledge of the move said on Monday.

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Brazil bandits steal $36 million of Samsung phones, computers

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Bandits attacked a Samsung Electronics Co Ltd factory near Sao Paulo late Sunday and held workers hostage while they robbed truckloads of smartphones, tablets and notebook computers that police valued at $36 million.

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Samsung Electronics says second quarter operating profit likely fell 24.5 percent

SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd on Tuesday said operating profit likely fell 24.5 percent in April-June to 7.2 trillion won ($7.12 billion) due to continued slowing growth in the company's cash cow smartphone business.

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