Oh yeah, also forgot to mention that fact that AOL Studios is continuing their build out. Electra, Entertainment Asylum and Digital City to name a few. Did you know that when Digital City New York previewed, it received over 8 million hits its first week up. That was an industry record.
Didn't AOL annouce a significant lay-off for the Asylum last month? All these "content" costs money to develop and maintain. (Continue below)
Now your really reaching - so now Yahoo! is effectivly the internet? It has made the hundreds of millions of web pages its very own? That is simply crazy. Go use Infoseek, HotBot, Excite, Lycos, Norther Light, Alta Vista, etc. etc.
That's why I used "effective content". Yahoo! puts everything on the net into a comprehensive directory. Someone who is a cat lover will be able to find many cat related pages at Yahoo!. So yes, it may not matter who created the content. Yahoo!'s directory make it easy for novices to find what they want. No search query syntax to figure out or 23,000 pages to weed through after typing "cat lover" into the query box. It really doesn't matter who created the content. If Yahoo! makes it easy to find the pages, then they are as good as Yahoo!'s "content." With all AOL's effort on content, how much "content" about cats can a member find in the AOL confine?
I see Yahoo! more and more like AOL in the sense that a novice could go to yahoo.com via their favorite web browser and spend hours looking at sites that interest them. Yahoo! has on-line chat and message boards just like AOL. (Isn't chat room the most popular AOL service?) Yahoo has made web chat as easy as point and click. No program to install or commands to learn like IRC.
AOL is trying to be both an ISP and a content directory to its members. So it's audience is always limited. Yahoo! is only the latter, and has the most name recognition over other search engines. It's the most easy one for novices. We can probably call it Novice's Search Engine.
The bottom line is, one can spend $21.95 for AOL's modem connection plus content, or $14.95 for MCI plus Yahoo!'s content. Is AOL's content worth the extra $7 per month? A novice person may sign-up with AOL and stay with it for a few months, but once he/she discovers Yahoo! and makes a serious comparison, $7 per month is a significant saving. |
