Yahoo’s mashup machine product rollout seems to be on upswing lately. Latest news is that Yahoo is partnering with Reuters to get it’s hands on Citizen Journalism. As part of the new effort both the media companies will showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by Yahoo users. Yahoo ‘YouWitnessNews’, which launches tomorrow, is banking upon digital cameras and camera phones amateurs to upload photos and videos that will appear on Flickr and Yahoo Video. Reuters and Yahoo editors will review these submissions to select images and videos that will be than be placed onto relevant news articles.
However unlike Yahoo Answers, there might be payment angle to the user generated content. Users whose content gets selected to be distribution to Reuters clients will be compensated for their work. Exact payment plans have yet to be figured out. It is expected that the regular payouts will be likely be low figures, and users will be paid more for exclusive rights to images and videos of major events.
Yahoo seems to be inclined more towards manual content discovery, upload, and sorting methods. On paper these services from Yahoo might look impressive, but I am sure how much revenues they are generate for Yahoo to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft. Also, with no strong focus on real product design, and development Yahoo will end up loosing it’s technical talent. Take the case of Yahoo Wii Portal. I don’t think that a real engineer will be looking to develop del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers, and Flickr mashups. Is that a career move for someone? Do we even really need these mashups in the first place?
Links:
Yahoo YouWitnessNews
