Last month Yahoo! announced the demise of their Podcast search directory, marking the beginning of a company-wide restructuring effort. This week the streamlining continues as they have stopped development in the entertainment group and are reportedly thinking of selling Kelkoo.
Yahoo! Podcasts will be closed on October 31st. There was no official word about why this was done when the announcement was made on the site in the last week of September. According to TechCrunch, the arrival of video sounded the death knell for most podcast services.
However, this week, news has emerged that Yahoo! intends to sell Kelkoo, the European comparison shopping service. “It’s had its good and its bad points, to be quite frank,” Yahoo’s U.K. managing director, Glen Drury admitted to Forbes. He continued: “I think that Kelkoo and all its competitors need to really re-think the way that they’re going to run their businesses in the future.”
Perhaps the most surprising story, though, comes from Yahoo! Music. All technical development work has been halted in Yahoo!’s entertainment division. A skeletal crew will continue to maintain the various entertainment properties, which include MusicMatch, Launch and Yahoo! Music. However, the editorial and development functions are being reassigned to other groups.
Employees previously working on entertainment at the San Diego office of Yahoo! have mostly been reassigned to work on the email service. The company is reportedly focusing on ad platforms and email. Some perceive this to be a good move, because MusicMaster has not been very successful and the other entertainment groups aren’t contributing much in terms of revenue either at present.
Signs of trouble seem to be cropping up every few weeks at Yahoo! When a company starts shutting down and selling off assets with increasing frequency, like Yahoo! has, investors start taking notice. Whilst aligning themselves with their main money-making markets – search advertising and email – might be a good thing, one can’t help but wonder if they’re not already too late to fight against Google’s ever-growing dominance of the industry.
