Yahoo! Weekly News: July 2, 2009

Jackson Juices Yahoo's Traffic
(Extracted from CNBC.com, 6/26/2009)In an earlier post I talked about the effect Michael Jackson's death was having on various big players on the internet. But one of the biggest players is seeing some of the biggest impact. just informed me that Yahoo News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million unique visitors in a day. The previous record was on Election Day with 15.1 million visitors. Yahoo News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4pm yesterday, in the wake of the news breaking, setting an hourly record. And Yahoo News set a record 175 million page views yesterday, the company's 4th highest day after the Barack Obama Inauguration and Hurricane Ike. For Yahoo's front page, an equally staggering story: The story "Michael Jackson rushed to hospital" generated 800,000 clicks in a 10 minute period beginning at 3:30pPDT. And Michael Jackson's death generated 560,000 clicks in a 10 minute period beginning at 4pPDT. Over at Yahoo Music, the blog post on Michael Jackson has already generated more than more than 21,000 comments. All of this speaks directly to what CEO Carol Bartz had to say at the company's annual shareholders meeting Thursday. Yahoo is more than merely a search destination, it's a community builder. And events like this spotlight the power of Yahoo online. And if Bartz can come up with a truly effective way to monetize all this traffic a lot better than Yahoo's done up until now, this company could be off to the races. This kind of traffic is truly stunning. Update: Yahoo now confirms that Michael Jackson's death is the highest clicking story in the history of the Yahoo homepage.

Yahoo to build data center near Buffalo
(Extracted from Associated Press, 6/30/2009)Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc. plans to open an East Coast regional data center near Buffalo. Gov. David Paterson on Tuesday said the center, housing computer systems and other equipment, is set to begin operating at an industrial park in Lockport in January 2011. The New York governor said it will create about 125 jobs and construction could begin this fall. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo has been expanding its number of data centers around the country. The centers use a large amount of energy, and Paterson said the New York Power Authority came up with a low-cost hydropower plan to lure Yahoo to Lockport. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer said he hopes Yahoo's decision will help other high-technology companies realize that the western York region offers "a well-educated, talented and affordable workforce, a high quality of life, and cheap, clean power."

Link from Yahoo breaks traffic records at New York Times
(Extracted from Neiman Journalism Lab, 6/30/2009)Behold the power of Yahoo: A link at the top of the site’s front page helped send more than 9 million page views to The New York Times in the span of two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the newspaper. That’s per a memo sent to staffers this morning, which said the Times’ servers withstood the deluge "brilliantly." (The piece to which Yahoo linked was a Home and Garden feature on bargain housing in undesirable locales.) But as we’ve seen with other news sites, the huge spike didn’t produce much advertising revenue — or, at least, not the copious coin you might expect from traffic at a rate of 7,300 hits per second. That’s because the Times could only serve cheap, remnant ads to its unanticipated visitors. Deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman told me over the phone today that they might have been able to wring more revenue from the traffic if Yahoo had linked to an article in the site’s Theater or Small Business sections, where demand is much higher for expensive advertising sold by the Times. I wrote about this quandary when The Wichita Eagle got a similar bump from the same spot on Yahoo’s homepage but only generated "a few thousand dollars" in ad revenue. There’s no easy solution here, but I still wonder if major publishers like McClatchy, which owns the Eagle, or The New York Times Co. could better prepare for selling ads against traffic spikes. One option might be forming an ad network of news sites expressly for that purpose. On the other hand, a link from Yahoo, the web’s second-most-popular site, is a unique experience that may be impossible to anticipate. "We get lots of traffic from Drudge and Huffington Post," Landman said in our brief conversation, "but under no circumstances do we ever get a spike like this."

Yahoo! Enables Twittering Via Flickr
(Extracted from CNET News.com, 6/30/2009)Flickr lets you post image links to Twitter. Yahoo has released a feature that lets people post Flickr photos to their Twitter accounts. The Twitter2Flickr feature requires that you enable Flickr as an approved application that can tweet under your username. Then, when you click the "blog this" link above a photo at Flickr, you're presented with the option to twitter it. The tweet will come with a "flic.kr" shortened URL. Flickr has a large number of users, and its use is amplified by the fact that other sites can make use of Flickr data through an API (application programming interface). The Twitter integration is a modest example of Yahoo's attempt to make its sites less of a walled garden by working better with other Web properties. A Twitter search for Flickr photographs indicates that a lot of people are making use of the integration, which had been in beta testing since earlier in June.