Yahoo Too Hopes Content Will Revive Revenues, Announces eNewsstand
Yahoo revealed its plans to launching the ‘Livestand from Yahoo’ in the next couple of months, a digital newsstand for tablets running at first on iOS and Android. Blake Irving, the company’s chief product officer announced in a conference call that Yahoo intends to deliver content of personal interest with the digital newsstand, asserting publishers’ inability to make full use of the tablet format, “plus, there’s consumer expectations. Most content on tablets are PDFs with some video. It’s a shallow and unrewarding experience.” According to Digital Daily, the platform will be integrated with Yahoo Finance as well as Yahoo Mail and it will support content sharing and commenting. ‘We see this as the next generation of Yahoo and we’re putting the full force of Yahoo behind it’ commented Irving.
Yahoo has an ace up its sleeve through its Yahoo Newspaper Consortium deal, and also experience in offering content via Yahoo Finance, Flickr, omg!, and the Yahoo! Contributor Network. Yahoo says the service will be subscription-based and that they are working on extending the service from tablets to smartphones and PCs.
Yahoo pays a great deal of attention to regaining its lost position, currently working on software to improve its mobile presence. Yet the digital newsstand might be the secret recipe for redeeming itself. Competitors are also focused on the digital newspapers and magazines direction. Google is tackling whether to import newspaper and magazine content to devices on Android and AOL recently took in The Huffington Post for $315 million.
Companies go after revenues, and every penny counts. Just as Yahoo envisages the digital newsstand to be subscription-based, Apple has also made some modifications to its service plan. Three weeks ago, Apple contacted European publishers to inform them that they will cease offering free access to iPad editions as ‘by offering free access to print subscribers, newspapers could avoid charging for access through the iPad, and can avoid paying Apple a 30% cut of all transactions on the App Store’, said AppleInsider Katie Marsal. The most probable result would be for publishers to turn to other platforms that have the least number of conditions around their pricing strategies.
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