Yahoo!s omg! Fills An Important Niche And Can Only Help The Search Portal Grow

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Yahoo’s ability to deliver useful services that attract lots of traffic continues to amaze me. The latest product from the Internet’s largest search portal is omg!

omg! is an entertainment magazine, kind of like People or Entertainment Weekly. They deliver the latest celebrity gossip and news and a sleek new attention-getting format that is attractive and a little bit on the tabloid side of the genre. One of the things Yahoo does well is on this new magazine look is to camouflage the ads within the main frame of the “cover.”

The Clever Disguise of omg! Ads

Well, they’re not really camouflaged, but they are cleverly disguised as they look just like the other clickable panels that allow users to navigate to the content they find most interesting. With products like omg!, Yahoo doesn’t really need to excel at search. This kind of products puts the search queries right in front of users so that they don’t have to search. Here’s an example:

If you’re interested in the latest gossip on Brad Pitt or Halle Berry then you can read omg! No need to search for their names and an extra word to get the scoop. You’ve got your tabloid gossip right in front of you. This is important because the likely case, if you did search for the latest gossip on Halle Berry or Brad Pitt, is you’d be taken to the stories that you’ll be reading in omg!, but they’d exist on a different website.

omg! Is A Good Lead-In To Other Yahoo! Services

If you click on the Jennifer Aniston photo you’ll go to a page with stunning photographs of the star and links to related stories. Users see what they want, but they stay on Yahoo! longer, which means they’ll likely use other Yahoo! content once they are done with omg! Scroll down the page and you see links to other Yahoo! products – Flickr, 360 degrees, Groups, Messenger, Health, Shopping, Travel, etc.

I think this is a brilliant move by Yahoo!, already the most trafficked website on the Internet. Plus, it should be a good revenue stream for the search portal. If they get enough traffic checking out the latest news and photos they publish then they can charge top dollar for advertising. It’s possible that Yahoo! will become a much more profitable company as a result and you’ll see the search portal stretch its lead in providing great popular search services. I see it as further nichification of the search marketing business.