Broken down Yahoo
Now that Jerry Yang is running Yahoo again, it'll get better right? I'm not so sure that Yahoo isn't broken beyond fixing. From my narrow perspective, they are the largest seller of intangible goods on the planet and as such are completely reliant on the goodwill of their clientele. Therefore they wouldn't want to alienate them, right?
Wrong.
They've announced a new program called Smart Ads, or personalized ads for sheep, er "customers;" like Yahoo has any. Smart Ads is a Yahoo-run database that is loaded up with the internals of a company's advertisements, key words, descriptive text, pictures. Yahoo then runs profiling software against the personal information of their users, like demographics, recent activity, historical searches and bought or derived information about the victim. They can then match the closest fitting ads to the person and even the state of mind that the chump is in at the moment.
At some level, this matching process is inevitable. It could even be argued that it's consumer friendly because it keeps away the noise or ill-fitting ads.
The problem that I have with this is twofold--first is that the consumer has absolutely no control over the process nor do they have the ability to directly examine and if necessary, challenge the stored profiles. My second problem is that it's Yahoo. I do not trust Yahoo and since they've released this program without a hint of additional privacy protection for their "customers", they clearly could care less.
Fundamentally Yahoo's business model is screwed up. They live or die on the "portal strategy" where people have to do everything on the Net on the Yahoo site. Although their actions made them avant-garde 10 years ago, today they are obstructionist. I don't believe that there will be a Yahoo 5 years from now. 10 years from now, people will laugh if you tell them that there used to be a company worth billions of dollars with that name.
Posted on July 03, 2007
