Yahoo is courting creators. Will others follow?
What could a stable of creators do with an audience of 185 million? We're about to find out.
I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while now, but I wanted to get some of the previous articles up so people know where my perspective is coming from. With some of those more foundational stories out of the way, I want to get more into recent events and developments in the media.
Nothing has excited me more than some of the moves Yahoo has been making over the past several months. For starters, Yahoo Sports brought on CespedesFamilyBBQ, AKA Jake Mintz & Jordan Shusterman, who rose to prominence for their entertaining takes on the game of baseball on social media and with their podcast. Next, Yahoo News announced the creation of a new creator partnership program.
Dubbed Yahoo for Creators, the program provides content creators with “an all-in-one platform to publish, monetize, connect and grow their businesses, by sharing stories to the Yahoo News network of more than 185 million monthly U.S. visitors.”
From the creator perspective, the appeal is obvious. For those worthy of partnership, you get access to an enormous microphone with which to further grow your audience and related revenue streams. The appeal for Yahoo? Well, for starters they’re adding content from sources that are largely self-sufficient, keeping production costs down, but they’re also able to acquire creators that diversify the content offerings at Yahoo News (the announcement touted “fitness, travel, home, DIY, style and more”), while also acquiring the audiences these creators have already established.
One example is Shareef “Ross Mac” McDonald, the CEO and star of Maconomics, who was recently added to Yahoo Financial’s premium experience. Ross Mac has over 85,000 followers on Instagram and another 12,000-plus followers on YouTube.
In looking at the big picture, it’s hard to find a flaw in Yahoo’s strategy. Yahoo’s single biggest strength has been its massive audience thanks to its old search-engine and email glory days, but it hadn’t exactly been feeding that audience the best content after years of cutbacks and layoffs cost them a lot of their best talent. But because that audience has endured through those lean years, that 185 million-plus audience represents something of a traffic floor. So, if you add talent and content that people think is good and engaging and valuable, how high can you raise the roof?
As you can tell, I’m a huge fan of this idea and more media companies should be thinking along these lines. There are reasons to not go this route — the biggest is the fear a creator, operating more or less with full autonomy, may say or do something questionable or go on a political rant, etc. — but that risk can be mitigated through vetting and contract language. Plus, if you really think about it, companies are already making bets like this. The only difference is that instead of “creator” they use the title “TV personality” or “political pundit.”
What’s the riskier play? Is it hiring a 20-something with big aspirations and a killer YouTube archive? Or is it bringing back Keith Olbermann to ESPN on a mega contract? Or, before that, adding the late Rush Limbaugh to the network’s NFL coverage?
I’d like for us all to agree that “creator” and “content” are not dirty words that carry a stigma of being less noble than “journalist.” Newsflash: A journalist is a content creator, they’re just curating their content differently.
The reason most creators are labeled solely as creators is because they aren’t necessarily working for a news outlet and/or they’ve yet to achieve a sufficient level of mainstream fame. But focusing on the lack of mainstream recognition ignores what a lot of creators have already achieved.
If Creator X has amassed a following in the hundreds of thousands, garnering millions of views on YouTube, without the discovery and distribution advantages of a mainstream media company, that’s pretty darn impressive. They’re already famous, just maybe not to the mainstream audience — a group that includes a lot of the company leaders making these hires.
But you know what can help those creators in that mainstream awareness department? Access to an audience of 185 million-plus. Cheers to Yahoo for recognizing and seizing on this opportunity.
Will it work out? I guess we’ll see. But the downside of this program (which Yahoo did call a “beta”) appears to be pretty minimal. They’re not going out and paying millions in talent acquisitions, they’re using their already established platform as a means to see what talented creators can take their audience to the next level with Yahoo’s help. If it doesn’t work out, it’s not like all of these creators are going to be stuck on the payroll. To me, this is a low-risk, high-reward bet, which is usually a smart bet to make.
Hi, I’m Mike. I’m a former editor for The Washington Post and ESPN. In 2024 I founded and now operate Launcher, LLC, a digital media consultancy operating out of Arlington, Va. Want to work together? Reach out on LinkedIn.