Yahoo Buzz – a Huge Carrot to All Publishers

Yahoo Buzz was launched back in February for a select group of publishers that were manually added to the system by Yahoo’s team (they started with 100 and eventually reached 400 publishers). While absolutely anyone with a Yahoo account could submit stories from the supported publishers and vote them up or down, it was not possible to submit a story if it did not originate from one of those supported publishers.

The main incentive for publishers was that every day some of the top stories on Buzz were sent right to Yahoo homepage and that resulted in huge traffic - something no site like Digg could ever bring.

Tonight Yahoo is rolling out the system to let absolutely any publisher in so it makes the system actually open and provides tons of opportunities to all the publishers. Now that the system is open all the publishers can grab their buttons for Yahoo Buzz and readers are invited to submit anything they want to. And the incentive becomes even stronger since for smaller publishers it will be even more appealing to get to the Yahoo homepage than it is to already established high-traffic sites.

What bothers me here is that Yahoo claims that they kept the limitation for publishers to fix some bugs and refine the product completely. Unfortunately I can’t see how the number of publishers that links could be taken from could influence the performance of the system - after all, the load on the system is determined more by the number of people that can submit the stories and votes mostly, not where the stories actually come from. True, the number of the stories in the system could also influence the load but I guess instead of limiting the range publishers they could easily limit the number of stories every site member could submit daily to keep the load under control. But whatever their reasons for keeping it closed for half a year, it is refreshing that now we don’t have that restriction any more.

What I expect to see now is hundreds of publishers rushing to Yahoo! Buzz with our stories actively looking for ways to get as many votes as possible to bring the story to the top and hopefully make it to the Yahoo homepage - a thing that has already been hyped by Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb for the huge traffic they got from it. And if that traffic was huge for those big enough publishers, I can imagine how tempting it will be for the rest of us. That said, I think it is definitely not a bad thing that Yahoo editors will manually choose what is actually sent to the homepage instead of automatically feeding the stories with the most votes to it - at least we will know that even if Buzz is gamed (and sure it will be gamed - it is definitely too much of a temptation), the story will still have to be actually good to get the eyeballs of thousands of visitors of the Yahoo homepage.

For now it does not look like a difficult job to get to the top of the Buzz - I can now see a few posts with less than 10 votes on them (with one of them only having 1 vote actually).

I have no idea how algorithm here works and what balance between positive and negative votes is needed to get to the top but I guess we’ll get at least some general understanding now that more publishers will be willing to find that out and probably make our findings public.

But in general I believe that it will grow more difficult to get where you want with Yahoo! Buzz once more publishers start pushing their stories to the top. But nevertheless I am quite positive that many publishers will welcome the opportunity to leave the ubiquitous Digg with its algorithm that is such a mystery to the majority of web population for something fresh, even if the algorithm is a similar puzzle (even though Yahoo at least tries to explain how the stories make it to the top).

So let me end this post now and rush to get the code for our very own Yahoo Buzz button, of course.