Yahoo!'s baffling online video strategy

During an interview discussing the company's rebranding, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz had an interesting take on Yahoo!'s online video strategy. The "It's You!" campaign, which will cost $100 million and run for 15 months, highlights Yahoo!'s mobile video capability, among other features.

It also will contain a heavy focus on online video, according to an eWeek report about Bartz' talk.

"Video is so crucial to our users and our advertisers, because video is an interesting and emotional way to tell a story, to entertain, to inform, to share. There's a big emphasis inside Yahoo on our video platform," Bartz said, according to eWeek. "Big cornerstone of our strategy is video."

While Bartz would be wise to incorporate online video prominently in the rebranding campaign, as Yahoo! largely has ceded that area to competitors like YouTube and Hulu, the search company also has made some very baffling moves regarding video that make Bartz' comments slightly odd.

Shuttering $160 million acquisition Maven Networks, which still had major clients, was the first odd play. And it's difficult to play heavily in video when you lay off 20 of the 25 people in that division, as Yahoo! did in May.

Yahoo! said it shut down Maven to focus more on consumer-facing video plays, such as the revamped original online video strategy the company announced back in March. But the company has not commented on the progress of these efforts, making it hard to believe they've been any sort of monumental success.

The biggest problem with Yahoo! is the constant perception that there is no underlying strategy, both as it relates to the company as a whole and, for our purposes, the video division. None of the company's moves around video seem to have any congruency, mirroring the haphazard shutter/spin off actions taken so far under Bartz, which today elicited a rant (Never!) from TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.

Yahoo! is poised to focus on the consumer plays it has drifted away from as it winds down non-essential businesses and sells off the ones it can still get a decent price for. But if Yahoo! is serious about trying to recapture consumer mindshare from Google, it's video strategy needs a serious revamp immediately too.

- Pete