by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m so old I remember when Yahoo first burst on to the public consciousness. It was probably around the same time as blogs like Suck.com took off. Those were wonderful, revolutionary times. My biggest regret is I wasn’t able to take advantage of them to do something more…productive…with my life.
Anyway.
Yahoo is kind of circling the drain right now. But it does have two big things going for it — eyeballs and a namebrand. Yet there is a major problem going forward: it’s kind of been bought simply to have all the money squeezed out of it while it slowly dies. For Yahoo to mean anything again, you would need someone with big bucks and a lot of vision to wrestle control of it and completely think outside the box.
If I had a few billion on me, here are two ideas as to what to do with Yahoo.
- Social media
While I know social media is not very hot right now, if you really wanted to save Yahoo, what you do is completely re-imagine it. You lay off a big chunk of its workforce and then rebuild it from the ground up to be something akin to a mixture of Twitter and Facebook. I have thought this out to an extreme, absurd degree. But, in general, what I would do is bone up on the old Usenet news of 25 years ago, updated it and make the site sort of like Reddit but with more features. - A Modern TV Guide
You might also turn Yahoo into a TV Guide of sorts for the all the streamers people now use. Turn Yahoo into an entertainment portal for streamers with content connected to them.
Otherwise, I got nothing.
