Yahoo! makes billions – but not from original content. Yahoo! makes money from other’s content by providing access to it – either by linking or aggregating.
Yet Yahoo! is hiring writers and correspondents to develop original content. Hot on the heals of hiring a roving war correspondent (see Content is king), Yahoo! announced the hiring of 10 financial news columnist
Why start hiring writers? Yahoo! is doing quite well thank you very much, but they know that content is king and are investing because that’s what we want. 66% of Americans with Internet access read online news on a regular basis. Purchases of pure content (think Wall Street Journal Online and others) is expected to top US$2 billion this year.
People love news. News is now the most read content on the Internet. Fueling the need for news is the news junkie’s heroin – RSS.
To review for those that still haven’t sampled the drug, 
stands for Really Simple Syndication. A script that allows users to "subscribe" to content within a client – such as as My Yahoo! or Feedster – that aggregates RSS content feeds. RSS is often most associated with blogs, podcasts and news sites. This blog of course has RSS subscription options as well. With the number of blogs at 15 million and growing at a rate o 80,000 per day then it’s a good think we have something to help us keep track of all of it.
RSS is now being used by most major news sites and publishers including CNN,
Surprisingly, most don’t even know that they are using it. A Nielsen/NetRatings survey this month of 2,129 online
Advertisers are now also heavily tapping into RSS. There are networks of blogs where an advertiser can buy a single ad appearing in numerous blogs. Ad-supported RSS feeds are now being offered by Yahoo! and WashingtonPost.com with marketers like American Express, Continental Airlines and Verizon. Just a few weeks ago Washingtonpost.com started putting ads in its RSS feeds.
