• Investor's Business Daily, Thursday, December 1, 2005 10:05 AM

Yahoo! is trying to be the first and last stop you make on the Web, says Investor's Business Daily. The one-time search engine/online directory is now the most visited destination on the Internet, having transformed itself into a newspaper-like content aggregator. For example, in preparing this news column everyday, this writer first reads AP, Reuters, and Dow Jones Newswire stories on Yahoo! News, going to their respective sites afterwards to retrieve the original links in order to keep the news organizations from giving the bosses at MediaPost a call. Why?--because Yahoo! slaps its own ads on its content partners' stories. But Yahoo!'s news aggregation system is definitely paying dividends. In fact, October data from Nielsen/NetRatings shows that Yahoo! News dwarfs other online news outfits, including CNN.com and NYTimes.com, accumulating 25 million unique visitors for the month, two million more than the No. 2 site, MSNBC. By contrast, Google's beta news project, Google News, ranked 14^th, with 7 million. The scary thing is that Yahoo!'s impressive numbers look set to grow, as the company continues to add content partners like Gawker media while hiring its own news reporters and columnists. Many analysts believe Yahoo!'s strategy of keeping users on its pages for as long as possible is a model for what a 21 ^st Century media company needs to be. Not if you're Google, though, whose strategy--so far, anyway--is the exact opposite.

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