WebProNews

As fresh members signed on, the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium helped a lot of companies achieve some impressive gains.  Yet there’s now a concern that nothing else will happen.

Yahoo Newspaper Alliance Shaky?

“A restaurant serving only lunch and dinner can boost its sales quite a bit by opening for breakfast,” explained Alan D. Mutter in an article on Silicon Valley Insider.  “But it can’t add other meals in the second, third and fourth years to match the first-year bonanza.”

Of course, the restaurant might continue to benefit from breakfast revenues, just as newspapers won’t be abandoned by Yahoo.  And a couple of weeks ago, our own David Utter covered a Deutsche Bank report that looked favorably upon the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium.  Newspapers could find themselves locked into their arrangement with Yahoo, however, and unable to adapt to new trends.

Mutter identified our troubled economy as one such trend.  Yahoo’s Hotjobs has been a major contributor to the Newspaper Consortium’s success, and if employers stop hiring, Hotjobs’s value will be greatly lessened.  Yahoo itself isn’t doing so well, either, and that has to affect the matter in some way.

To get a conclusive answer, though, we may simply need to wait this one out; publishers had been joining the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium with some regularity, so any change (or lack thereof) in that pattern will indicate how far these concerns have spread.