yahoo
Tumblr, Yahoo, and Ads That Don't Suck
Here’s a semi-article, in that it’s more like a rant, but certainly not a link post. If you’ve seen similar stuff in your dashboard, feel free to let me know.
Dear Marissa and David,
Joe here. I’ve used all of Tumblr’s competitors extensively and I settled on Tumblr because it’s mindfully-designed, community-focused, and dead simple. The lack of ads helped, but more important to me than services with no ads are services that do have ads at least respecting their users enough to have decent ads.
So.
Keep ads for The Bachelorette out of my dashboard feed. Please consider presenting users with relevant ads. Scan my blog, the tags i use, the words I like, the stuff I link to. After all, you own it. So look at it. Run it through an algorithm and spit out some sort of value which you can key to a set of sponsored posts that, based on their weighted relevance to my interests and the things I cover on my blog, may actually be interesting to me. This is more palatable to users and more valuable to advertisers than showing me some random woman running around on the beach.
Over and over again.
Despite my never clicking it or reblogging it or seeing it without making an angry face and swearing never to watch that goddamn show. This dashboard spam does not bode well for Tumblr’s future at Yahoo, and that makes me sad, because I like Tumblr, and I rather like both of your styles, to the extent I can know anything about them from reading things on the Internet or watching you do interviews.
You said you wouldn’t fuck this up, but the glut of sponsored posts in my feed tonight about something I’ve never given any corner of the web any reason to think I care about suggests otherwise. Turn it around while you still can.
Change Yahoo, change Tumblr a bit if you must, but why not change advertising and the typically adversarial relationship between advertisers and target audiences while you’re at it?
in other words, don’t shove bad ads in our faces. If we wanted that we would turn on the TV or some other medium that can only collect data in really clumsy inaccurate old ways.
You’ve disrupted plenty of things, why not this?
If you ever want more advice, get in touch. I’ve got lots of ideas.
Sincerely, Joe Ross
Yahoo: The Marissa Mayer Turnaround
Yahoo: The Marissa Mayer Turnaround
Jean-Louis Gassée consistently provides insight and, perhaps even more importantly in today’s tech-writing landscape, truly elegant prose. This is a great write-up, but I recommend you make Monday Note one of your weekly reads. He and Frédéric Filloux are often voices of reason among the din of unqualified opinion.
Analysis over revision: Kara Swisher's mysterious edits to Marissa Mayer's Yahoo! memo (Updated)
Updated 12:00 p.m: Kara Swisher reached out to me on Twitter after I published this post (her tweets and my replies here, here, here, here, and here).
She said she only made minor edits to things like commas and contractions, and that she thought people would assume that she didn’t rewrite the substance. She is right; I should have focused on wanting her take on what I describe below as the interesting bits and not on her revision. She also told me I should have asked her. She is right about that, too. I stand by my wanting some analysis of the areas I mention below where Mayer’s memo departs from PR speak, but to the extent that my post appeared to question Ms. Swisher’s integrity, I am sorry._
Kara Swisher, writing at All Things D about new Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s recent memo to employees:
I took that to heart in tracking down this do-not-forward (oops) memo —- which I changed around > a bit to thwart those who try to stop me from getting these emails via tricky computer programs […]
“Changed around a bit” to what extent? Does that diminish or eliminate the value, if any, of the memo to readers? Was there any value to readers to begin with? My answers are probably “yes” and “no” respectively.
I’m not the only one thinking these things, some commenters asked the same questions. I think Ms. Swisher should have analyzed the interesting parts of the memo, posting little or none of the actual text. It would have been better use of her knowledge and skills, and would have been more valuable to readers.
The memo itself is nothing special. I can summarize it as “I’m happy to be here, I think Yahoo! is great, I have big plans, but don’t stop doing what you’re doing (unless you hear otherwise) until I learn more about the company’s management culture and direction.”
But Ms. Swisher’s casual mention that she edited it gives me pause. It’s not exactly a sensitive diplomatic report, but mysterious edits by a journalist to a document originally written by the subject of the article make me uneasy.
Ms. Swisher is laudably dogged about disclosing her spouse’s role as an executive at Google. There is a link to her disclosure and ethics policy at the bottom of all her articles. That’s why this offhand mention of memo-revision reads as out of place to me.
Ms. Swisher could have published the unedited version of the memo as an image, likely thwarting any “tricky computer programs” aimed at preventing her future access to such internal emails in the future. Alternatively, she could have simnply written about the bits that weren’t cliche corporate-speak.
For example, Ms. Mayer said in the memo that “While I have some ideas, I need to develop a more informed perspective before making strategy or direction changes.” That suggests the pace of change at Yahoo! under her leadership may initially be slower than observers would like, but will likely accelerate as she soaks up institutional knowledge about how the company functions.
Another interesting bit says “Please don’t stop. If you have questions or concerns about whether to continue or not, please ask. However, with the exception of a few things that might heavily constrain us in the future, the answer is most likely: Yes, keep moving.” What is going on at Yahoo! right now that “might heavily constrain” them in the future if employees don’t pull the plug?
Finally, Ms. Mayer said “We will continue to invest in talent, so we can produce the most compelling and exciting user experiences anywhere.” That tracks with the Flickr team’s response to dearmarissamayer.com, asking people to apply for jobs there.
But does Ms. Mayer’s comment suggest that Yahoo! will be ramping up compensation and benefits, going on a hiring and expansion spree to bet the company on a new army of innovators, or just building out the kind of infrastructure and marketing that will make current employees proud to work there again?
Ms. Swisher is a journalist and I am not a journalist. She is talented and successful, and no doubt has a better editorial sensibility (or at least a more refined one) than I do. But I can’t help thinking that a breakdown of the memo’s telling points would have been more worthy of her efforts and our reading time than posting it in its entirety with some unknown edits.