Yahoo! (YHOO) is the No. 1 provider of general, financial and sports news on the Internet, says forbes.com citing comScore; beating out rival Google (GOOG) and other sites.
About 40 percent of those that use Yahoo! end up taking a look at the various news on the site, bringing in about 50 million viewers monthly.
The major force behind the success is Scott Moore, vice president of news and information for the company.
Moore has built the service through a number of licensing and distribution deals with a variety of outlets, focusing on building relationships with other media companies while his people worked on putting together content packages.
Not having to develop their own content, it allows the division to run lean and be more profitable.
One other key element of Yahoo's success, has been the implementation of a similar model that was made popular by the Drudge Report, which drives high traffic results by providing links to stories and sites outside the web page. While it's counterintuitive, it's what works phenomenally well on the Internet.
As Moore says, “It was an unnatural act because we weren't getting paid. We thought, 'What? Why are we sending our audience to be monetized by somebody else?'"
Moore adds that while about 20 million people click on a link and leave the Yahoo! site monthly, traffic has grown as a result.
This is similar to what is happening with online ads industry, as companies put together a large number of sites to visit, representing a huge amount of visitors, and from there distribute it across the Internet. It works similar with content aggregators who bring interesting stories together for people to then go off and look at.
This is the new supply chain on the Internet, as far as content and ads go. Companies bring things to a centralized location on the Internet so they can then send people or ads to wherever they want. It's one of the most powerful models in a number of different businesses online.
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