San Francisco — Internet giant Yahoo building on its acquisition of ‘content farm’ earlier this year, began unfolding its properties to outside writers, photographers and videographers on Monday with the launch of the “Yahoo Contributor Network.”
Essentially, building on its acquisition of Associated Content earlier this year, which has been retooled as the Yahoo Contributor Network, a new platform for Yahoo’s vast online empire, empowering people to publish their creative content on the Web portal.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based search portal said the Yahoo Contributor Network as an “evolution” of Associated Content, a platform hosting 400,000 contributors from around the United States which Yahoo snapped in May for a reported 100 million dollars, will bring contributions from a host of freelance writers, photographers and videographers to popular media destinations, such as Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports and the Yahoo Homepage.
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“The launch of the Yahoo Contributor Network is a great example of how Yahoo is executing against its content strategy,” said Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo.
In less than six months since the acquisition of Associated Content, we have completely reorganized the platform in order to bring the people’s voice to Yahoo,” said Bartz.
The new program is available to all Yahoo users to share their perspectives, and lets Yahoo editors assign and select crowd-sourced contributions for all of the company’s media properties. The retooled platform empowers people to use their creative talents, taking pictures, recording audio, or writing stories for different Yahoo sites. These freelance producers will be absorbed into the Yahoo Contributor Network.
“Delivering this authentic perspective to Yahoo’s most popular sites will deepen our engagement with the millions of people who visit us every day and provide new opportunities for creative contributors who participate in the Yahoo experience,” Bartz said in a statement.
“With the unfurling of the Yahoo Contributor Network, our contributors now have an unprecedented opportunity for exposure and distribution across Yahoo’s portfolio,” Luke Beatty, vice president and general manager for Yahoo, said in a blog post. “Associated Content has been known for maintaining the industry’s largest contributors base, and with the launch of the Yahoo Contributor Network, we have added scale and reach that sets us apart from any other crowd-sourced media platform.”
The reorganized freelance platform also sets performance payment guidelines for content featured on Yahoo sites and includes a dashboard for tracking how each contributor’s work performs.
The company is positioning this as a way for regular users to contribute, but what the move really does is get a lot more content in the Yahoo network. Yahoo said its material is viewed by more than 600 million unique visitors every month.
Users who already contributes to Associated Content just have to sign into the Yahoo Contributor Network with their existing user-name and password. For new users to start submitting stories and multimedia content, users must fill out a registration form. Users will earn money based on the performance of their articles.
Yahoo’s latest maneuver is an emphasis on content. While it has been taking steps in re-inventing itself, it has not shown too many results thus far. AOL, another internet giant which has seen better days, is also betting on content.