Revisiting "what is Yahoo?" - Yahoo is local

I wrote yesterday about Yahoo's new (beta) hyperlocal websites - currently live in a few dozen US neighbourhoods but with big plans to expand to a footprint of 400,000 contributors. Yahoo's ambition to fill their local sites with original reporting makes this a potentially big deal for both the company and the hyperlocal space, but a massive pool of writing talent isn't all thay Yahoo brings to this party. In fact, hyperlocal makes genuinely intelligent use of Yahoo's notoriously diverse portfolio of acquisitions and there is the potential - perhaps for the very first time - to actually tie together a lot of Yahoo's bolt-on acquisitions as part of a coherent strategy.

Let's start with the news, which for this project Yahoo is both creating and aggregating. Yahoo is the web's most popular news site (not just aggregator but news website of any kind), by a factor of almost two. Say what you want about other people having better tech or better content, from an audience point of view what Yahoo does to aggregate news really works. For another, what Yahoo is pulling together here is genuinely good, relevant content - a combination of existing local blogs, local events, movies listings and original local content. 

 More importantly, much - maybe even most - of what Yahoo is "aggregating" is Yahoo's own content. Events are from Upcoming (acquired Oct 2005). Movie listings are Yahoo Movies. Original local content comes out of the new Yahoo Contributor Network (acquired as Associated Content May this year). The original local content may well be the killer feature across these sites, but it's far from being the only hyperlocal asset that Yahoo has brought to bear. 

And that's before Yahoo has even rolled out its really impressive local proposition - market-leading photo sharing website Flickr. Flickr would add a visual richness and depth to Yahoo's local sites with which very few other sites, especially start-ups, would be able to compete, and the photos are already helpfully tagged for location by Flickr's millions of users. Here's 30-odd good photos of Haight Ashbury (remember, a neighbourhood of only c10k people) posted to Flickr in the last 24 or so hours.  Here's the last week in photos of Brooklyn Heights. That's before Yahoo starts to integrate local Answers and local Delicious tags, or explores the possibilities for adding local sports content from Rivals and Citizensports. Let's not kid ourselves that all those random $100m buys along the way were part of a coherent strategy that would one day give Yahoo an absolutely killer hyperlocal portfolio...but as it turns out, all those random $100m buys might well have done just that. 

Does it get us any closer to that $21bn question "what is Yahoo?" In a small way, it does. Yahoo is a bunch of websites (a more generous man might say "portfolio"). Some of these are absolute world-class market leaders (Flickr is perhaps the cause célèbre, and Yahoo's own Answers product kicked Google out of the ring back in 2oo6); some, while facing major new challenges, are still solid cash-cow legacy businesses (Yahoo mail, Yahoo Finance); and many are bolt-on acquisitions that have never hitherto fit into any sort of broader strategy (Upcoming, Delicious). Local looks like something that might bring a lot of these disparate properties finally together. Has Yahoo therefore finally found its way with local? As it turns out, local may be the glue that holds Yahoo together.