Yahoo Buzz

» see buzz.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

by the time yahoo buzz launched in february 2008, the social-news category had already been settled. digg owned the upvote-driven story queue, reddit was beginning to climb, and the comment communities at each site were sticky enough that a yahoo-branded clone showing up four years late was not going to recruit anyone away from where they already lived. yahoo's pitch was that it had something digg did not, which was the front page of yahoo.com pointing at the buzz queue twice a day. that did move a startling amount of traffic in the early months. it did not move many users.

the product itself was a digg-shaped voting front-end and a publisher widget. the widget was a small "buzz up" button that any news site could embed; clicking it added a vote and a link to the yahoo buzz queue. for publishers this was a real distribution channel for a couple of years, since a story that crossed the threshold for the yahoo front page would get hundreds of thousands of visitors in a single afternoon. the new york times, the washington post, the BBC and several other outlets wired the button into their CMS. for users the experience was that yahoo buzz was a thinner, less argumentative digg with worse comments.

carol bartz took over as yahoo CEO in january 2009. the product-cull season followed: yahoo 360 was already dead, geocities and briefcase went next, photos went, mash went, and buzz was on the same list. yahoo announced the shutdown on april 4 2011 and pulled the plug on april 21. venturebeat's headline that week was that yahoo had killed buzz and nobody seemed to have noticed.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

the buzz button worked too well in one direction and not at all in the other. publishers loved it because the yahoo front page could send half a million visitors. users mostly arrived from yahoo, voted on a story, and left, which meant the community that the digg model depended on never built. comment threads on buzz were notorious for being shallow and full of yahoo-front-page drive-by accounts, which made the regular vote-and-discuss community feel uninhabited. for digg's audience it was uninteresting. for yahoo's audience it was just another front-page module.

~ what it became ~

nothing, really. the buzz button vanished overnight from a few thousand publisher sites. the queue archive went dark. the yahoo trending topics product that came later was unrelated infrastructure. the ironic part is that digg itself, which had won the category buzz was trying to copy, was about a year away from its own collapse. v4 launched in august 2010 and the audience walked out, betaworks bought the carcass for $500k in 2012, and reddit absorbed the rest of the social-news category. buzz outlived the format it imitated by about as long as it took to wind down.

~ the day it died ~

yahoo posted the shutdown notice on april 4 2011 with a 17-day countdown. publishers got an email asking them to remove the buzz button from their sites. on april 21 the buzz.yahoo.com domain started returning a redirect to yahoo news. there was no archive download, no community migration plan, no successor product. it was a clean, indifferent shutdown of the kind yahoo had become very practiced at by 2011. the carol bartz era's main legacy was a steady cadence of these obituaries, one or two a quarter, of products yahoo had bought or built and then quietly let die.

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