Yahoo
Provocative remarks by Yahoo Inc. CEO Carol Bartz at an investor conference in New York this week illustrate how major Internet channels and niche publications are benefiting from the Woods controversy.
Known for her off-color commentary, Bartz told financial analysts Tuesday that the Woods story is “better than Michael Jackson dying” for helping Yahoo make money, because it is easier to sell ads against salacious content than morbid stories.
“Its kind of hard to put an ad up next to a funeral,” she said.
In response to a question, Bartz even said Woods will “absolutely” help Yahoo make its numbers this quarter, a comment the company now says was meant to be a joke.
Google Inc. and Yahoo, which combined process more than 80 percent of all Internet searches in the U.S., said theyve seen a significant spike in traffic from people looking for information on the golf superstar and his alleged extramarital affairs. Yahoo says searches for Woods name are up more than 3,900 percent over the last 30 days. Neither Google nor Yahoo would provide specifics about how many more people were searching.
But the traffic bump still is not as pronounced as those that surrounded the entertainers death in June and Obamas inauguration in January, both companies said.
Search volume at the peak of interest in Jacksons death was more than twice as heavy as the biggest days of searching for news about Woods, Google said. Revelations about Woods private life began emerging last month after he crashed his sport utility vehicle outside his home in a gated community in Florida.
Despite holding a distant second-place ranking to Google in search, Yahoo outflanked its rival last week in drawing more traffic to its sites from people searching the Internet in the U.S. for Woods name, according to Hitwise, a research firm that studies Web traffic.
Hitwise says Yahoo and Yahoo News snagged more than 17 percent of all the traffic to major sites that came from searches of Woods name. Thats ahead of Woods own Web site, CNN.com and Googles news site.
The firm said Yahoos popular Web portal and e-mail service were likely big helps in attracting the traffic.
Smaller publications also are benefiting.
Time Inc. says its Golf.com Web site, which averages 2.4 million unique viewers a month, has seen traffic spike 600 percent since the story about Tiger broke after the Thanksgiving holiday. The traffic is similar to levels the publications sees only during major golf championships, said Scott Novak, spokesman for Sports Illustrated Group, which publishes Golf.com.
Googles statistics show that searches for Michael Jackson stayed strong in the days after his death but fell off dramatically after a couple of weeks.
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AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke contributed to this story from San Francisco.