(Image to the left courtesy of Gizmodo.)
As I wrote not so long ago in an earlier post which is worth reconsidering here given the news, Yahoo!'s fate is a wake-up call for all of us in the digital media business (and presents an opportunity for the ultimate buyer, so long as it moves aggressively).
What happened here?
Well, Yahoo!'s media strategy certainly didn't help. It failed, plain and simple. I wrote a detailed post about this about one year ago (titled "Yahoo Kills Its YouTube Killer - So What's Still Alive?") when Yahoo! threw up the white flag to its long-rumored, but not-to-be, YouTube "killer."
As I wrote then, that move "demonstrat[ed] Yahoo!'s continued indecision and overall flailing (failing?) in the OTT video content space. And, this certainly is not an opportune time for flailing -- for an unfocused/scattered/disrupted (you choose the word) video strategy (or complete lack thereof?) when the video focus/strategy/execution of others (behemoths like Facebook and Snapchat and others like Vessel) are ever more sharp, precise, resourced, abundantly clear ... and, with some, massively successful (by all accounts, Facebook is killing it)."
Sad indeed. After all, Yahoo! had every opportunity to massively succeed -- it controlled uniquely compelling resources and ingredients (that I discussed long ago in a blog post from 2013) that gave Yahoo! the potential to drive real success as an alternative to YouTube and in the burgeoning OTT world. But months (now years) ticked by and, alas, little came (except a revolving door of new execs and departing frustrated execs). Yes, there was significant video activity, but no recognizable strategy to it all (nor any real reported success in those efforts). As I reported back then, many senior execs with whom I had spoken confirmed overall frustration time and time again. In the words of one respected digital exec -- and former Yahoo! senior exec on the content side who left in frustration -- "Yahoo!'s video strategy had been overtaken by confusing multiple layers of decision-making, internal conflict, and what some even called chaos." Nor did it help that Yahoo! failed in its attempt to buy a controlling stake in Dailymotion, Europe's YouTube. Not its fault (French regulators killed that deal), but still failure to launch.
Meanwhile, as Yahoo! flailed, the video world radically changed. What once was, in essence, a YouTube-only video world for creators is now, of course, a world of multiple competing video platforms with massive competing players like Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Sling TV (and the burgeoning number of stand-alone OTTs like NBC's Seeso). So, as I wrote last April, and faced with those realities, "Yahoo! is running out of time amidst the current great OTT video land grab of 2015."
But, even less than one year ago, I still felt that Yahoo!'s media strategy was potentially salvage-able if it "ha[d] a major Dailymotion-like acquisition trick up its sleeve that will soon come to light and finally catapult it into the OTT video big leagues (where it absolutely could belong if it had the will and focus)."
Sadly, that simply was not to be (although it could have been).
And now here we are ...