The new rebranded Yahoo is gaining some speed and is about to relaunch its homepage, but we read some interesting criticism of how the current plan won’t work out as well as just taking a lot more from the outside Internet.
Especially gaming. Why create it when it’s already there, waiting to be embedded?
From Business Insider:
Social gaming is turning into a real business. Last week, we spoke to Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga. He told us his startup is profitable and we’ve heard his company will reach over $100 million in revenues in 2009. It makes that money when users buy virtual goods that help them along in the games.
Zynga is already more popular than all of Yahoo Games. Its game FarmVille added 12 million users in the last two weeks. Most of Zynga’s games are played by Facebook users on Facebook. Soon, Facebook plans to get in on all that virtual goods buying by offer its users a “Pay With Facebook” button. If users get used to that form of payments, Facebook could put “Pay With Facebook” buttons on e-commerce sites all over the Web, opening a huge new line of business. There is no reason Yahoo can’t be doing all this too. It has hundreds of millions of users. MySpace is Facebook’s only real competitor, and it’s faltering.
Here’s what Yahoo needs to do:
– There should be a more prominent social games module on the Yahoo.com homepage, filled with games created by third-party developers.
– At the very least, Yahoo should import the Facebook platform as module its homepage and domain and ask for a slice of any “Pay With Facebook” revenues earned there.
– Start including daily active users (DAU) into its metrics. Aim to beat MySpace.
Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
