Yahoo’s new brand strategy feels all wrong. Repurposing content? What will differentiate this from any other aggregating website?
This is all based on the faux idea that this content is somehow “theirs”, because they “own” Flickr etc. But they don’t (the users do), and it’s not (it’s out there in RSS and other formats). I could duplicate their brand platforms in an afternoon (ok, a few weeks of work perhaps), and so can anyone else. You don’t build a destination on aggregation. Aggregation without value add is not a viable strategy.
Instead, Yahoo should build more tools to let people easily create and aggregate content themselves. I’m pretty sure that this initiative will fade away within a year and will mean more opportunity cost incurred for Yahoo.