• The New York Times, Thursday, June 21, 2007 11:03 AM

Jerry Yang has been steering the Yahoo ship for just one day, but the Yahoo board saw fit to go through with the acquisition of sports publisher Rivals.com, which focuses mainly on college and high school sports. Yahoo is currently ranked second in sports, with 15 million unique users behind ESPN.com with 17.5 million monthly users, according to comScore Media Metrix. Other major competitors include MSN/Fox Sports and AOL Sports. Rivals.com is 19th, with 1.4 million uniques. The acquisition is believed to be in the $100 million range.

It looks like the Web giant has shifted its focus back to acquiring and licensing material to enhance its position as a content leader. Under the now-departed Lloyd Braun, Yahoo's strategy was to create Web content that competes directly with the TV networks. Now, Yahoo is licensing content from NBC, ABC and Fox, which is how it built up its news and finance divisions. (Yahoo is ranked first on the Web in both categories.)

"We are very serious about leading in the media space," Scott Moore, Yahoo's senior vice president of news and information affirms. Meanwhile, the company's media division is still undergoing a monumental shift: Braun's departure was followed by the resignation of executives who ran its music, health and food Web sites. Yahoo's other problem is an audience that skews older than Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and YouTube.

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