Buys Freelance News Site Associated Content
By Michael Liedtke, Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --Yahoo Inc. is buying freelance news site Associated Content in a deal that will add a more folksy touch to one of the world’s biggest websites.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
The acquisition announced Tuesday will enable Yahoo to supplement its regular lineup of stories by full-time reporters with independently produced material that typically isn’t covered by traditional media outlets.
Associated Content, launched in 2005 by Luke Beatty, bills itself as “the people’s media company.” It has developed a low-cost news model that relies on about 380,000 freelancers who share their expertise on a variety of subjects.
The material includes how-to advice, review, opinion pieces and coverage about what’s happening in neighborhoods around the United States.
The stories evidently are striking a chord: Associated Content attracted 16 million visitors last month, according to comScore Inc. That exceeded the roughly 14 million people who visited The New York Times’ Web site last month, comScore said.
Yahoo plans to sprinkle Associated Content’s contributions throughout its news, sports, finance and entertainment sections. Yahoo will continue to publish stories that it gets from newspapers, its own editorial staff and outlets that include The Associated Press.
Associated Content “gives us more local gravitas,” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in a Tuesday interview.
By providing more parochial stories, Yahoo hopes to widen its audience and create more opportunities to sell online ads tied to the neighborhoods or topics that Associated Content’s freelancers are covering. Yahoo has been slumping for most of the past four years because it has been losing online ad revenue to rivals such as Google Inc. and Facebook.
Yahoo’s decision to expand the breadth of its local coverage is similar to a strategy being pursued by AOL Inc. as its CEO, Tim Armstrong, tries to turn around that company.
AOL is trying to build two low-cost local news sites, Seed.com and Patch.com.
Armstrong stands to personally profit from Associated Content’s sale because he is among the startup’s early investors and even served as its chairman until two years ago. He helped fund Associated Content while he was still a top advertising executive at Google.
Associated Content’s CEO, Patrick Keane, used to work at Google with Armstrong.
Yahoo plans to close Associated Content’s website after it completes the acquisition in the third quarter.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More