Posts tagged ‘Associated Content’

  • 24 May 2010 at 5:14 PM

What Yahoo’s Deal for Associated Content Means

By

Last week Yahoo agreed to spend $90 million on Associated Content. While we sniffed at the quality of Associated’s two million-plus consumer-written articles, the deal has serious implications for the media business. Here’s how it impacts four different constituents.

For Yahoo
I think we can safely say that it depends on post-deal execution, as it usually does with these things. On the one hand that $90 million could prove to be a big ol’ waste of money: Associated’s content isn’t high-value stuff, CPM’s for lower-value inventory will inevitably keep being driven drown by the proliferation of supply and the reduction of friction in the buying process, and both Associated’s network of Joe and Jane Doe contributors and its technology platform could’ve been replicated by a company with Yahoo’s resources for a lot less than $90 million.

On the other hand if it can focus this army on providing the types of content demanded by advertisers — particularly local and niche advertisers who’ve yet to be effectively mined as a source of display revenue but could be extremely lucrative — while finding better ways of vetting the content for quality and building greater demand for brand advertising online, that $90 million could end up looking like a small price to have paid.

For media dealmakers
Dealmakers will read this as another positive indication that the media M&A market is coming back. I’ve only spoken to one lawyer and one banker on the topic, but both seemed confident this was good news for them. We’ve already seen an acceleration of the pace of dealmaking in the technology sector and the banker’s theory was that this deal would trigger more activity in the digital content space.

Obviously if you’re an entrepreneur looking for crazy multiples, you’d still rather you had invented some instantly scalable, must-have mobile software, but the fact that Yahoo — which has at times tried to distance itself from the media business — is snapping up content and talking about why it wants to be a media company must be a good sign for media owners who create original content. Right?

Read more »

  • 21 May 2010 at 2:51 PM

In Deal for Associated Content, Yahoo Buys the Farm

By

Earlier this week, Yahoo purchased Associated Content for about $100 million, giving Yahoo an enormous library of inexpensive, search-engine optimized content and the means to produce much more of it. Associated Content is usually described as a content farm or content mill, but you could certainly pick many other descriptors for its model: the mass production of low-cost and, I would argue, low-quality articles.

Associated ContentRemember those Chinese factories that made cheap Mattel toys that had be recalled? Well, this is the digital publishing version of that. But instead of producing toys with poisonous lead paint or tiny magnets that will break off and choke your kid, Associated Content and its army of more than 300,000 writers like JerseyNana (pictured)–who generally get paid between $3 and $7 per article– might tell you how to dislodge a cheap toy from as asphyxiating infant’s throat. A good chunk of the more than 2 million articles published since the company’s launch in 2005 attempt to deliver practical information on subjects like health, cars, technology and entertainment.

Much as BP has impacted the Gulf of Mexico, Associated Content’s gusher has changed the ecosystem of the web. By nature of its Google-friendly headlines, Associated Content stories often hog top search results on many common queries.

That’s one of the qualities that attracted Yahoo as it faces off with AOL, which recently announced its own plans to get into the content agribusiness to replace the cratered dial-up internet access business it was built on, how-to-video studio Demand Media, Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, and, of course, major destinations in each specialty field, from ESPN to WebMD, who all participate in the great scrum for search-result dominance.

Naturally, Associated Content has its critics, who can be divided into two classes: those offended by the low payment given authors and those offended by the utter drek it often produces. In interviews following the deal, Yahoo executives were quick to defend the quality of the newest addition to its portfolio. Said Yahoo Media VP James Pitaro, “They have very good quality across all media. I would say quality is their main differentiator. Their editorial process is more rigorous than what we expected.”

Given the low cost and, uh, democratic editorial approach, this is clearly a claim worth vetting. So I spent some time wandering the rows of Associated Content’s contentfield to sample the new inventory Yahoo will be offering its advertisers.

What I found was a blend of bland conventional wisdom, salt-of-the-earth pontificating, off-the-cuff quackery, jumbled grammar, awful logic, failure narratives, and straight-up weirdness that will one-day offer unparalleled fodder university courses in narratology and epistemology, assuming of course that those fields don’t get boiled down to Associated Content articles.

Click through for a few representative articles:

Matt Creamer is executive editor of Breaking Media. You can follow him on Twitter at @matt_creamer.

1 2 3 4 5 6Next page »