Scott Karp got his knickers in a twist and is taking tech bloggers to task and says Yahoo Tech is tech for rest of us. Funny, my point, exactly. C/Net and Yahoo Tech two different audiences.

Both Richard and Om Malik bemoan the site’s “consumerism” because it doesn’t have the sober tech-as-religion feel of CNET.

How about that? My points of contention for Yahoo Tech. (I am going to list them, for the sake of simplicity.)

1. It resembles one big advertorial.
2. The result might be appealing for the mass market users looking for basic content
3. It does lack the depth of C/Net content.

Conclusion: The end-users might be quite different for the two sites.

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

3 thoughts on “More Yahoo Tech Reactions”

  1. Om, you’re assuming that the majority of CNET’s audience uses the site because it’s the right level of geekiness for their needs and not because it was essentially the only game in town. The real question is whether Yahoo will both steal CNET’s audience and grow it’s own “mass market” audience (which by definition is BIG), thereby creating a significantly larger audience that will be more valuable from an advertising perspective. If that happens, Yahoo will start to meaningfully siphon off ad dollars from CNET.

    And what is the metric for “depth of content” — is it ratio of “expert” reviews to “user” reviews? Is that rather un-2.0? Doesn’t better a platform for peer-to-peer sharing of technology information yield more “depth” in the 2.0 sense?

    As to the sites “advertorial” appearance, that is in the eye of the beholder — I think that’s a “geekish” perception and I don’t think most people will see it that way.

    But then, I’m a geek, so what do I know about other people’s perceptions?

  2. “tech for the rest of us” Soon to follow — tampons for men.

  3. i agree, the two sites attempt to target different demographics…”attempt” being the keyword…tech.yahoo.com wants to go after the non-tech savvy stay-at-home mom in the Midwest, but fails to realize “Jennifer” is going to be overwhelmed by an over abundance of DHTML features and banner advertisements…

    why would tech.yahoo.com display banner advertisements when they have shopping.yahoo.com as their base with a the far superior CPC model?

    also, I love how everyone is praising tech.yahoo.com on introducing social features…I do not consider declaring ownership of a product and adding products to a general tech list as significant social features

    BUT…I do respect Yahoo for having the insight to realize niche shopping portals are the way to go

Comments are closed.