GigaOM Pro

My paidContent colleague Staci Kramer calls Yahoo’s re-org “blurry.” That about sums it up. The news is a new e-commerce group that many think will be headed by CEO Scott Thompson’s former PayPal colleague, Sam Shrauger, who just left PayPal. Commerce seems to be on equal footing with media and with Yahoo’s communications apps. Ad sales is another big group, but Yahoo’s ad networks live off in a technology group, which makes observers think they’re for sale. My recommendations for Yahoo were to double down on content and brand advertising, and forget about trying to be a tech platform or an ad network. The fuzzy notion for e-commerce seems to be to try to close the loop between awareness and demand creation and actual purchases, but Yahoo’s not saying how. Nor how it’s going to get better at applying all the data it’s already collecting to make its marketing and commerce services more effective.