Yahoo has formally made its entry into the online content space in India. The Internet giant has launched its cricket channel on Yahoo India with cricketing legend Sunil Gavaskar so far being the sole columnist providing original content.
In a country where cricket is nothing short of a religion, many online experts are seeing it as a late entry. More so, since Yahoo already has a cricket microsite on Yahoo UK. Yahoo India is likely to be hamstrung by the late-mover disadvantage in a situation where Cricinfo.com and Cricketnext.com, apart from the cricket channels of Indiatimes, Hindustan Times and Indian Express already have the eyeballs of cricket lovers.
Predictions on how this site is going to fare will depend on how one looks at things. If one were to see this as a new site which wants to take on the cricketing giants, then Yahoo India Cricket's is as good as a lost cause. It is, however, unlikely that Yahoo is looking at it from this point of view. Its country general manager Neville Taraporewalla asserted, "We believe 70 per cent of Internet users in India, who log on to Yahoo, deserve better cricket property. The USP of the site is its good value pack."
From the look of the Yahoo microsite (with all its interactive gimmicks like crictionary), it appears to be quite a pompous statement. Hollow in both quality and quantity of content, it has the trappings of a latter-day upstart. It is anything but better cricket property. The value pack, whatever that means, is confined to Gavaskar's halo. To wean away cricket fans, nay fanatics, from other sites, Yahoo will have to do little more than breastfeeding to make cricketing or business sense.
Business sense might lie in a recent study by JuxtConsult which found that 38 per cent of India's urban Net users prefer Yahoo for communications both emails and instant messaging. It would make business sense for Yahoo to ensure that these people do not migrate to other sites when it comes to cricket. Especially since the portal of choice according to eStatsIndia's Portal Perception Study is Rediff.com, with Yahoo being next-placed.
The Yahoo India cricket microsite cannot, nevertheless, be seen just in isolation, or from the point of view of cricket alone. The move has to be perceived in the light of recent moves by Yahoo to provide original content through its international and country portals. In September, Yahoo created a flutter in the news world when it announced the hiring of war correspondent Kevin Sites to produce a multimedia website which would report on conflicts around the world. Just as the Hot Zone (hotzone.yahoo.com) was going live, the company declared that nine popular writers would be publishing personal finance columns on Yahoo.
A simplistic web directory which slowly became an aggregator of news, Yahoo made it clear about its intentions to take on traditional media almost a year back when it hired veteran newsperson Neil Budde to run its news operations. Budde had replaced a person who did not come from an editorial background.
Since then Yahoo officials have been time and again making noises about the legacy-laden traditional media. In June, Yahoo UK's editor Simon Hinde went to the extent of saying, "The bias and political spin of mainstream news has alienated younger readers and contributed to the popularity of mix and match Internet news."
It was with this young audience in mind that Yahoo launched itz Hot Zone. Of course, what can be a better way of drawing young audiences obsessed with violent video games to the real world of real news than with a multimedia site designed with gore.
Hinde had made some tall statements. "Young people are leaving newspapers in droves because print news isn't trustworthy," he said. "It's vanity on the part of newspapers to push a particular political view. Facts are distorted to fit a particular view of the world and they don't give a dispassionate view of events." Recent crises in the traditional media had contributed to mistrust of mainstream media.
Points well made. But so far no Yahoo official has been able to justify why the company was instrumental in the jailing of Chinese journalist Shi Tao.
Yahoo is as much a corporate entity like the media powerhouses it has been criticising. It is not really here to do some yeoman service to the world of news and journalism. It is here to make money, and journalists, as the China incident has shown, can rot in hell.
