As you probably know, Google’s Panda update originally targeted content farm sites. Demand Media’s eHow was the poster child, but back in the early Panda days, Yahoo also had such a content network called Associated Content.
After Panda, it deleted 75,000 articles, following in the footsteps of Demand Media’s recovery strategy. It also changed Associated Content to Yahoo Voices as the “official digital library” of the Yahoo Contributor Network.
Now, Yahoo is just killing off the whole thing.
The whole concept was part of Yahoo’s strategy while CEO Marissa Mayer was still working at Google. While she may not have dealed with it directly, she has now presumably seen the situation from both points of view, and this is the decision she has made.
The announcement came as part of a round of “spring cleaning” along with news of the company shutting down eight other products.
Yahoo will close Voices on July 31st and the Contributor site at the end of August. They’ve already been sending emails out to contributors alerting them of the news. For contributors, the assignments have already been few and far between, so the news probably won’t come as too big a shock to most.
Yahoo says it is focusing its energy on its four core areas: search, communications, digital magazines, and video, as well as Flickr and Tumblr.
Fortunately for Yahoo, unlike many other Panda victims, it doesn’t rely on its Pandalized content to pay the bills. There were no mentions of layoffs in the announcement.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
