Yahoo! omg!

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

~ the obit ~

celebrity gossip was a vertical that mapped to a specific american web of 2005 to 2012, and i was on a different web. perez hilton and tmz and gawker and people.com were the names i would see referenced in articles, never as habits. yahoo omg was the portal entry into that scene, and it had the portal scale to make a real noise inside it.

yahoo launched omg in june 2007. the brand was the punctuation, lower-case omg with the exclamation mark, the kind of name you can only get away with for about six years. content was a mix of syndication from access hollywood, reuters, ap, and original celebrity coverage. at peak in november 2013 the site pulled 32.4 million unique visitors a month, which is portal-scale audience even by yahoo's portal-scale standards.

the trouble with the brand was that it was hard to sell against. advertisers wanted yahoo celebrity, not yahoo omg. on 6 january 2014 yahoo dropped the lowercase punctuation entirely and renamed the property yahoo celebrity. the omg name was retired the same way an old domain gets pointed at a redirect. one tuesday in january.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

omg was the portal-flavored answer to the gossip blogs. perez hilton had built an empire out of doodling on celebrity photos, tmz was running on staff lawyers and parking lot ambushes, and gawker was busy being gawker. yahoo's pitch was different. the gossip would still be there, but underneath was yahoo's homepage funnel and yahoo's ad inventory and yahoo's recommendation widgets all routing readers into the same vertical. it was tabloid energy with portal plumbing.

~ the long tail ~

after the 2014 rename the property kept going as yahoo celebrity, then was absorbed into yahoo entertainment around 2017. the underlying url at omg.yahoo.com redirected for a while, then stopped. tmz survived. perez hilton's site survived in a smaller form. the portal version of celebrity gossip, the one that needed homepage traffic and an exclamation mark to work, did not survive past the brand swap. the news cycle had already moved to twitter and was about to move to instagram.

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