Yahoo is testing out a new creator program that will allow certain writers to publish and monetize stories under the Yahoo News brand, the company tells Fast Company.
The effort is meant to broaden the news platform’s lifestyle content—which it described as fitness, DIY, travel, home, and style stories—in a rapidly changing media landscape. So it won’t be available for people who want to write about things like politics or sports. The draw to creators, meanwhile, is the chance to expand their audience bases while earning ad and affiliate revenues.
“We hear consistently that people want to get their news from other people,” says Kat Downs Mulder, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo News. “They have institutions they trust, but they also really want connections . . . In addition to the publisher network that we have, and the journalists that we have in-house, creators would add an additional dimension to that content. And so it would really help us to flesh out that whole ecosystem of content as we really look to become the world’s best guide to the internet.”
The platform is starting off with a small group of selected creators. Eventually, anyone will be able to apply to the program.
The posts will be highlighted alongside Yahoo News’s traditional content, meant to be distinguished with a small “creator” tag. They’ll be more evergreen, meaning they’ll likely have a long shelf life compared to traditional news posts on the site. The company shared an example of a post titled “6 books you wouldn’t mind reading on repeat to your toddler,” which includes links to purchase each of those six titles on Amazon.
The initial 21 creators, who were invited to join the platform’s beta test, will use a content management system that guides them through a specific article template. From there, they’ll be able to add licensed Getty images, text, and links to products (which could open them up to affiliate revenue). They’ll also have access to a dashboard that shows insight into article metrics and earnings.
Creators won’t have to pitch ideas to editors, though there could be a system set up for planning purposes. The creators have control over the content that goes up and can post on their own accord, though the company said it should follow Yahoo’s content guidelines and will be monitored by what it said are a mix of machines and humans. If a post needs editing, a Yahoo editor can take over post-publication and make changes. It’s running essentially on a trust system, where the vetted creators will stay away from publishing harmful content.
Yahoo plans to expand its creator network “into the hundreds” over the next few months. Of course there’s reason for some skepticism here, namely because a number of high-profile, creator-led initiatives have stumbled in the recent past. Substack, for example, was forced to resort to a community funding round last year, and continues to deal with fallout over some of its far-right content. Medium, meanwhile, has gone through a seemingly endless run of creator-led initiatives—none of which have actually made the platform profitable (although CEO Tony Stubblebine predicted the company would hit profitability in 2024, which would mark a first in its 11-year existence).
Yahoo has fared surprisingly well under new owner Apollo Global Management, who bought the company from Verizon in 2021. (Verizon still retains a 10% stake.) Yahoo generated roughly $8 billion in revenues with a significant profit margin in 2022, Axios reported, and under Apollo has completed a series of high-profile acquisitions including the media startup StrictlyVC and the social investing service CommonStock. Even now, after Yahoo has long been usurped by Google in the search hierarchy, the site is still the eighth-most trafficked in the U.S., according to the analytics site Semrush.
Still, the fact remains that more and more people are turning to creator-led platforms like YouTube and TikTok for news rather than traditional media organizations. One in five Gen Zers get their news from TikTok according to a report last year from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And Yahoo believes it can capitalize on that trend.
“Creators continue to grow as a leading source of information and content and the creator economy only shows signs of upward momentum,” the company said in a news release.
Amber Kemp-Gerstel, the creator behind Damask Love, was one of the creators Yahoo pitched early on to come to the platform. Kemp-Gerstel, who focuses on crafting content, says she saw it as a way to bring back the long-form blog content that she got started with nearly a decade ago and grew her following on. She now has nearly 120,000 Instagram followers, a show on Disney+, and digital stationery business. She acknowledges that there will be an initial hurdle of figuring out how to differentiate her own platform’s content from the stuff she’s posting on Yahoo.
“My audience that I’ve built over time kind of knows me more intimately than the Yahoo audience would,” Kemp-Gerstel says. “I think it’s going to have a broader scope than what I would share with my own audience, which is kind of fun.”
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