Yahoo's incentivised content strategy

When was the last time you searched for something and landed on a yahoo owned page, chances are negligible, i myself dont remember landing on a yahoo property for once in my life. I m sure yahoo's share of traffic generated from search engines is really negligible even when they are having one of the most search engine friendly property.. the reason is lack of content. When i search i generally land up at some of the demand media's content farm.

Yahoo after buying associatedcontent.com which is similar to demand media and is involved in creating content farms transferred it into a service called yahoo voices. Yahoo voices allows anyone to write an article and pays the writer for every page view, the current rates go upto 2$ per 1000 impression which is very decent or should i say much better in comparison if you are going to start a blog and put adsense on it. Being on a yahoo sub domain makes it extremely search engine friendly plus one has the benefit of traffic being distributed from yahoo itself.

Thou the quality of articles are really substandard but still yahoo can drive significant traffic towards it with this feature. What more yahoo even suggest a list of topics on which you can write about, and these topics are selected on the basis of search engine relevancy, so if its Christmas then article suggestions would be for Christmas related topics.. Basically its a nice move, also its beneficial for freelance writers, some of them do make serious money.

How i came to know about this was a guy was offering a software that would inflate page views for the yahoo articles which you have written, so this is the fraud angle. Yeh, as expected the guy is an Indian, Indians have been notorious with click fraud and Google had an hard time weaning them out, google rarely accepts Indian publishers these days for its adsense program. So now its yahoo's turn for some fraudulent impression from the fraud Indians.