Yahoo! News Story Matches

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[frontpage]

I noticed today while doing a news search using Yah** that they are getting more aggressive in charging to view news. It looks like that they are charging $2.50 (US) per story.

An example is "baseball" search. A news story from May 13, 2002, just a short 3 days ago now costs $2.50 to view the story.

I believe this tactic may dry up alot of traffic to e-newspapers as people may balk at paying $2.50 to view the a 400 word story.

What do you think?

[Lisa]

People votes with their wallets. And I think I can find news that costs nothing. So why would I vote for Yahoo? What do they offer that others don't.

[frontpage]

It seems that Yah** draws alot of their news items from the NY T*mes newspaper.

Wouldn't just be more cost effective to get an electronic subscription from NYT and just cut Yah** and the $2.50 charge out of the loop.

As far as business model goes:

Why $2.50 per article? Just seems too high for the masses. Perhaps, $0.50 seems more reasonable to test the waters.

[Bentler]

I can't see paying money for mystery meat. What really annoys me about this, though, is that the news search now returns a fraction of the relevant public domain articles it used to.

I've seen this misguided approach before-- essentially, Yahoo is trying to increase revenue by offering a worse product. Google could do much better IMO.

[JamesR]

frontpage, are you referring to the new premium search service? (url is in this thread [webmasterworld.com])

Also, Brett noticed the redirect to Northern Light news ads here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Looks like Yahoo is partnering with NL, probably a revenue sharing idea (thanks to DrCool for pointing that out)