Yahoo Needs To Become Yahoo Local

I was just perusing Rafat Ali’s Reinventing Yahoo post where he recommends that Yahoo should buy TripAdvisor as the first step in a strategy to redefine itself as the “people-powered listings business”. He then goes on to suggest Yelp, HomeAway, OpenTable, Trulia (home of ex-Yahoo Local GM Paul Levine btw) and Zillow as other potential acquisitions. The idea being:

“This plan leverages its user base, still the second largest in the world, to build its future.

It can continue to focus on content assets that build on top of those listings and reviews assets, as a loyalty driver.”

I’ve got to say I like the idea because what he’s really saying is that Yahoo needs to quintuple down on Local.

A few years ago Yahoo Local was a big player in the local search scene – they had a ton of traffic and were doing aggressive marketing. I am sure they still have a fair amount of traffic but as far as I can tell they have not done much to move the needle on the service in a long time. The site looks pretty much like it looked four years ago. Update: Anthony Moore, Director of Editorial at Yahoo! points me towards the new beta.local.yahoo.com which launched in December. I have always been mystified by this because as we localistas know Local is where the biggest bucks are – of course it’s also one of the hardest markets to crack at scale.

But bringing together best-of-breed players in each important vertical, who have all cracked local at scale in one way or another, could be a potential game changer for Yahoo. Of course they could always screw up the co’s once they acquire them – see Flickr – but these assets could be powerful if brought together in the right way.

Happy 2012 btw.

Update: Now that I think about it, it wouldn’t be bad idea for them to merge with eBay either, given eBay’s focus on local commerce and Yahoo’s new CEO’s PayPal/eBay background.