Yahoo Shakeup Highlights Internet Shift
The departure of television veteran Lloyd Braun from Yahoo Inc. underscores a shift, or at least a major hiccup, by Internet companies away from creating costly original content.
Braun, who once ran primetime programming for the Walt Disney Co.’s ABC network, left Yahoo this week after his role was greatly diminished in a companywide reorganization that placed his group into a newly created division.
Yahoo’s hiring of Braun to run the new Yahoo Media Group two years ago sparked speculation that the online company was itching to become, in effect, a TV network on the Web, producing its own shows to attract eyeballs to its lucrative Internet advertising.
After all, Braun was responsible for ABC’s nascent turnaround and the genius behind its hit show “Lost.” Analysts saw great symbolism in the consolidation of Yahoo’s far-flung media sites — music, video, finance and news — into a new Santa Monica office that was once home of fabled movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
But two years ago, no one foresaw the rise of sites such as YouTube and MySpace, which became huge companies by aggregating user-generated videos and creating communities where people could network. YouTube was eventually bought by search giant Google Inc. for $1.76 billion, while MySpace was snatched by News Corp. for $580 million.
Few people also foresaw that major media companies such as Disney, CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc. would begin selling TV episodes or full-length films over Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes store.
As YouTube and similar sites grew in popularity, Braun struggled to get competing Yahoo divisions to think in terms of content rather than technology, Braun recounted in an interview at his Santa Monica office several weeks before his departure.
One major glitch that consumed more than a year, for instance, was the lack of common software for producing and publishing content at the various…
