Yahoo Voices Shutting Down

Yahoo sent an email the other day to the members of it’s nearly decade old Yahoo Contributor Network. The Yahoo Voices Contributor Network provided an outlet for bloggers, and writers across many categories like news, tech, sports and finance, with a built in audience of 600 million.

The contributor network paid it’s writers monthly. It was a great way for aspiring writers to make a little extra money but more importantly get their voices heard.

Now that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has turned to the talents of former New York Times writer David Pogue to revamp their content strategy, it appears the contributor network no longer has a place.

While some praised Yahoo Voices, for it’s ability to give writers a voice, others criticized the service because in their eyes it provided marginal content and equated to quantity vs quality. It was often compared to AOL’s Patch Network. Patch is AOL’s localized news network that provides local community news. Although different by design, those same critics have often spoken out about the level of writing on Patch verses AOL’s marquee content sites like Engadget and Joystiq.

Part of that may be in play here with Yahoo as Pogue sets out to revitalize Yahoo as a destination for original content.

Yahoo Voices got it’s start in 2005 as Associated Content and was acquired by Yahoo in 2009 for an undisclosed amount, but often reported as near $100 million dollars. At the onset of the acquisition the Yahoo Voices content network was performing extremely well on search engines, specifically Google. But digging in deep found that the network was filled with keyword stuffing. The Panda upgrade to Google’s search engine algorithms in February of 2011 damaged the network badly as seen here in this graph provided by geeksided.com

Yahoo officially changed the name of Associated Content to Yahoo Voices immediately following the Panda fiasco and moved the content directly to the yahoo.com domain name. They also put newly submitted content through an approval process before it landed on the Yahoo site.

Geeksided.com reports that by 2013 Yahoo Voices was on a downward spiral. Yahoo used to provide some contributors with upfront payments and all but eliminated that program in 2013.

Now Yahoo Voices will see it’s ultimate fate. On July 31st Yahoo Voices will become inaccessible and the content will be scrubbed with rights returned to the writers on August 1st. Yahoo will make final contributor payments on August 15th.

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