• by Joe Mandese , June 16, 2010

Peter Kafka is a good journalist, but he's a lousy on-stage interviewer. He asks a question, and then before his interview subject can answer, he asks another. That's annoying for me as a spectator, and it's got to be annoying for James Pitaro, the head of media that he's interviewing at OMMA Publish this morning.

Don't get me wrong, I understand why Kafka is doing that. It's what journalists are supposed to do – to prove they're good journalists, right? But I'd actually like to hear Pitaro's answers, because Kafka is asking him some good questions.

One of them is why Yahoo is once again looking to pump up the volume of its original content, amid an online publishing marketplace awash in a sea of content. In other words, why add more inventory when a ton of online inventory is already bringing CPMs down.

"It seems like you're going to do it yourself," Kafka asks Pitaro about the impact more Yahoo content will have in satiating demand from advertisers and driving CPMs down.

Specifically citing Yahoo's recent acquisition of demand-based content creator Associated Content – for a reported $90 million – Pitaro said it basically was done in order to fill in niche content areas that Yahoo doesn't already excel in – say lacrosse coverage on Yahoo Sports.

"What we can do now, is we can decide very quickly to launch lacrosse vertical within Yahoo Sports. And we can take specific requests out to the market," Pitaro said, noting that Associated Content can source the creation of that niche lacrosse content to the 380,000 contributors in the Associated Content network.

"Pretty much within a week or two, we can have lacrosse vertical. Now the quality may not be as high," Pitaro acknowledged, but at least it would be in the game, so to speak.

Pitaro