The Kardashians Rank Higher Than Yahoo

May 20, 2016

I avoid the Kardashians and other fame chasers, because I have better things to do with my time.  I never figured that I would actually write about the Kardashians, but the phrase “never say never” comes into play.  As I read Vanity Fair’s “Marissa Mayer Vs. ‘Kim Kardashian’s Ass” : What Sunk Yahoo’s Media Ambitions?” tells a bleak story about the current happenings at Yahoo.

Yahoo has ended many of its services, let go fifteen percent of staff, and there are very few journalists left on the team.  The remaining journalists are not worried about producing golden content, they have to compete with a lot already on the Web, especially “Kim Kardashian’s ass” as they say.

When Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo as the CEO in 2012, she was determined to carve out Yahoo’s identity as a tech company.  Mayer, however, wanted Yahoo to be media powerhouse, so she hired many well-known journalists to run specific niche projects in popular areas from finance to beauty to politics.  It was not a successful move and now Yahoo is tightening its belt one more time.  The Yahoo news algorithm did not mesh with the big name journalists, the hope was that their names would soar above popular content such as Kim Kardashian’s ass.  They did not.

Much of Yahoo’s current work comes from the Alibaba market.  The result is:

“But the irony is that Mayer, a self-professed geek from Silicon Valley, threw so much of her reputation behind high-profile media figures and went with her gut, just like a 1980s magazine editor—when even magazine editors, including those who don’t profess to “get” technology, have long abandoned that practice themselves, in favor of what the geeks in Silicon Valley are doing.”

Mayer was trying to create a premiere media company, but lower quality content is more popular than top of the line journalists.  The masses prefer junk food in their news.

 

Whitney Grace, May 20, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

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