Yahoo is doing more than rolling out new advertising campaigns that shed a negative light on Google. The struggling search engine is making acquisitions that shed a positive light on its network.
On Tuesday, Yahoo announced an agreement to acquire Associated Content. With the deal, Yahoo is moving to offer more relevant content to its 600 million users and give its tens of thousands of advertisers more relevant backdrops against which to trumpet their wares.
An emboldened Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz called the deal a game changer and outlined the plan for the Associated Content acquisition: To “create more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network.”
Managing Low-Paid Freelancers
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. What we do know is that Associated Content was founded by Luke Beatty in Denver in 2004. Associated Content boasts more than 16 million unique users per month, according to comScore, and the editorial staff reviews more than 50,000 pieces of content — including articles, images, audio and video — every month.
Associated Content brings about 380,000 contributing writers on more than 60,000 topics to the Yahoo table. Yahoo plans to leverage that force to better its social, mobile, local and media offerings with more diverse content. Associated Content’s articles are U.S.-centric, but Yahoo plans to scale the crowd-sourced content platform globally.
Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, said the Associated Content acquisition may turn out to be a genius move for Yahoo — but it’s very complicated.
“Yahoo, which has long aspired to produce its own content, now must manage hundreds of low-paid freelancers. It does provide a way to generate more traffic and page views that can host display ads, but I’m skeptical that this is going…