Today I read this. It basically says that Yahoo is about to announce the closure of Yahoo Photos, in order to support Flickr, acquired also by them in 2005. This is directly related to the quick growth of Flickr in the past months (although Yahoo Photos still has a larger number of images uploaded).
But the most important thing here, is that as a Yahoo Photos registered user, you’ll not be forced to switch to Flickr, instead you have a number of options (including important competitors such as Photobucket and Kodak Gallery). So, for me as a user, this means I’m truly important for Yahoo. This also applies to a series of developments they’ve announced in the past few months.
This brings me to a question. How effective can a similar action be on a much less developed country (in a “techy” manner of speaking) like Mexico?
Obviously the consumer is also the priority, but what about the market competitors? My guess is that probably they would use your own actions to confuse current and potential users. Probably they would make all they can to turn that right back against you somehow. This may sound a bit exaggerated, but in a country where it’s consumers are 5 years behind in basically everything that matters online, ignorance, and the lack of online culture comes as a great threat. Probably you are thinking “why should I care about my competitors?… That is so 2k!” and I would say something like “Exactly!, about 5 years behind”.
In my last post I mentioned Dixo, my own online project that was born from a personal need, which was the lack of places to express real opinion. So, a friend and I decided to gather people and some other friends that had been working on traditional media over the past 10 years in Mexico and I introduced to them blogs and podcast as a possible new media, that would fit this empty space, and that we would not have to deal with editorials anymore.
It’s been around a year and a half since we launched, and still, each and every time the concept is introduced we have to start by giving the definition of blog (I won’t even mention with the podcasts issue). So we’re still in the process of creating an audience, but this came as a handy tool for our competitors to take advantage. Pointing the obvious, the internet does not work as old media. Thus that last post where I mentioned how we get to make the rules in terms of new media. But still, how can you pretend to make both competitors and users act under this new rules with the lack of culture I mentioned before? The other question that comes to my mind is whether Yahoo’s recent activity work as well with it’s massive audience here in Mexico?
Good initiatives, wrong place, or maybe just the wrong time. I’ll keep you posted.
WHAT TO DO NOW?