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The Times today reported a possible deal between Newscorp and Yahoo! whereby Newscorp would divest itself of MySpace to Yahoo! in return for a 25 stake in the enlarged company.

John Delaney of Ovum says it all here - it sounds like a possible smart move for all involved.

By the figures alone, and not even considering John’s comments about the strategy, based on Yahoo!’s value of around $37bn, that makes MySpace worth around $9bn.

Other reports on the story here, and here.

After spending billions of dollars on trying to become THE internet company, Microsoft is said (again) to be in talks with Yahoo. The now-its-on, now-its-off talks have begun again, though analysts say its unlikely that MS will buy Yahoo outright. Even a merger of some sort is likely to cause major cultural and managerial problems for the pair, and its not clear if the resulting company would be fast or agile enough to overthrow the dominance of the big G.

Jason Dowdell, of Marketing Shift, writes….

No where does user generated content have potential for greater impact than in local search. People who live in a neighborhood are the best qualified to provide information and keep it up to date, but it has been slow going so far.

Yahoo has been adding UGC to its Local site, include allowing people to update listings, submit reviews, photos, and ratings, (per SearchEngineWatch although for some reason the participation from the user community has been tepid at best. I’m guessing that because there are so many options (Google, InsiderPages, CitySearch), that users are splitting up their contributions, which results in a less than comprehensive service anywhere.

OA is here

DI> I propose the reason that takeup from the user community has been “tepid at best” is not because of all the choice, as Jason suggests, but because Yahoo and others still want to exercise editorial control. On Yahoo etc you can suggest a change, but it still all gets funnelled through their editors so you dont see your change immediately. With no immediate ‘reward’ we’re less likely to take action. The fear of innacurate updates and vandalism that drives Yahoo et al to insert editorial control is exactly the same fear that Nupedia had before they became wikipedia. It shoudln’t work but it does. Its down to a simple principle that its easier and faster to clean up (or revert) the vandalism than it is to commit it. So, Yahoo is going some way, but its not far enough. Open up editorial control to the users, you may be surprised what you get.

Official and confirmed from Yahoo: They bought MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network. The size of the deal is not being confirmed, although rumors put it at $10 - $12 million.

Business week has a long article about Yahoo’s Panama project and why it may not have the positive financial impact the company is hoping for. Yahoo’s goal for Panama is to make their pay-per-click advertising program more efficient at extracting dollars from advertisers. The details aren’t important, but the basic idea is that the highest bid on a keyword doesn’t guarantee it takes the top ad spot. A combination of highest bid and highest click through rate determines where ads are placed. That change should bump up the average cost-per-click, and have a positive effect on Yahoo’s revenue.

The article doesn’t mention Microsoft’s Adcenter product, which is a full generation beyond both Panama and Google’s existing product because it factors in demographic information about the person viewing the advertisement. While Microsoft hasn’t ramped up on advertisers yet, it’s clear that this is a three way race. An example of how much Microsoft means business is the fact that they probably bought their way into handling ads for Facebook. Without a revenue guarantee, Facebook would have gone with Google or Yahoo.

Frankly I don’t know who’s going to win the contextual advertising war over the long run. The important thing is that Yahoo has finally weaponed up, and the war is starting in earnest. Google has long hidden its revenue share details with partners, although the rumors suggest that they keep 50%ish of the gross revenue. This is way too much, and in a properly competitive market that percentage will tend towards zero as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all compete for the same page views. Profit will need to be generated based on new product features and efficiency gains, which is the way it should be. Of course, they’ll always own their own internal page views as well, and it will be an important factor. To get the participation of the big advertisers there needs to be enough inventory to make it worth their attention. And without a robust network of advertisers the auction prices won’t go high enough. Still, all three of these companies have massive internal page views to lure these big advertisers.

So while I don’t know how much of a difference Panama will make to Yahoo’s bottom line next year, I know that the fact that they are catching up to Google is good for all of us.

OA on is on Techcrunch here

Metacafe, the video sharing site, is reportedly being sold for between $200-300 million. The buyer is currently unknown but there is speculation that it may be Yahoo.

In July, Metacafe recieved $15 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. The company was founded in 2004 and has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.

OA is here

Have Camera Phone? Yahoo and Reuters Want You to Work for Their News Service - New York Times.

An interesting article … in the New York Times about a joint effort on behalf of Reuters and Yahoo! to attempt to monetize Yahoo!’s large and constantly updated collection of user photos.

“Starting tomorrow, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States, according to comScore MediaMetrix. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.”

Which is very interesting and something that probably should happen.

A couple of thoughts though.

First off is that a news agency’s reputation is *everything*. This is a bold step on the part of Reuters. Even with experienced editors reviewing the images there certainly can be fraudulent photos submitted.

If you are a blog, or digg, or some other kind of user generated content service, people to a certain degree (or at least should to a certain degree) take what gets published with a grain of salt. After all anyone can write a blog and anyone can submit to digg. Certainly over time some bloggers build up reputations that can be as solid as a news agency, but in the end it’s the news agencies out there that have the most to lose when bad news gets out there.

“This is an imperfect process. Last summer, a blogger discovered that photos of the conflict in Lebanon by a freelance photographer working for Reuters had been digitally altered. Reuters stopped using the photographer and withdrew his work from its archive. The company is now trying to develop software that will help detect altered photographs.”

So it’s a big step for Reuters to make the jump from hiring known photographers (who can still cheat) to letting anyone in the world submit photos. I think this is good, I’m just surprised to see it under their name. I would have thought that even if they wanted to get into the user generated photo news business that they would create some kind of a subsidiary with all kinds of let the viewer beware labels or something.

It will be interesting to see how people respond the first time someone gets a doctored photo published as news on Reuters. Who knows, maybe nobody will care.

The thing with news though is that it breaks fast. We say this with the London bombings when photos of the bombings broke on Flickr before the major news outlets. And sometimes when it breaks fast you don’t have the time to do the due diligence with a photo. I wonder who will be the first person to get a goatse or a hidden image of Howard Stern in the background of a photo picked up by them.

So I think this is an interesting and bold idea by Reuters and Yahoo is probably the perfect company to match with this.

…

“Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment. Mr. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments.”

Full OA by Thomas Hawk is here: http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/blogtalk/wpn-58-20061204YahooandReuterstoPayforUserGeneratedPhotos.html