So, within a couple months or so after the time of this writing, Yahoo! Voices will be gone. I can say that as a part-time writer for the site (I only wrote 240 articles over six years) I am quite saddened by the loss. For those who have written so much more and acquired literally millions of page-views via that site, the loss has to feel virtually catastrophic.
Timothy Sexton has been a writer there long since Yahoo! took over and decided to goof it up; ever since it was originally Associated Content. He was their first Writer of the Year (or Producer of the year or whatever it was- he was the first one) and he's written nearly 7,400 articles which have garnered nearly 17,500,000 page views since 2005. For those of his peer group, the decision of Yahoo! to drop this aspect of their business structure must be life-changing.
At the time of this writing, I have yet to know of a firm decision on the part of Yahoo! to dump this aspect of their product, but one would have merely thought they would have sold it in much the same way Associated Content sold it to them. Could it be that this sort of information dissemination has become somewhat outdated or deemed untrustworthy. Admittedly, they let people write and submit to publication just about anything they wanted, as long as some level of verification and quality standard was part of the submission. It is true that referencing something from this site was considered even less worthy than something from Wikipedia, and that says something. But hey, anyone can take something for face value and determine the level of facts with little effort.
Perhaps Yahoo! Voices took such a deliberately Liberal bent and largely avoided anything else that caused this early death. But that's difficult to support since virtually everything within the mainstream media has committed this act. Could it be that fewer people than hoped responded to the ads placed on each article and piece submitted? Well, if Yahoo! Voices was making the company a mint, I wouldn't be here writing this now. I would be working on another article to place on Yahoo! Voices. Well, maybe. I've only placed two articles there since the turn of the year.
What I liked about writing there was that anything I placed on Yahoo! Voices could have been placed right here where you are reading this blog. But doesn't having it supported by the big name of Yahoo! give the work some clout? Doesn't it make you feel important and as though you'd rub elbows with the writers of The New Yorker at any moment? Well, maybe not that on high, but anyone who can spell okeedokee can write a fricken blog. That's called free speech and freedom of the press. But not everyone gets to find their quality work accepted by one of the biggest names on the Wild West of the Internet.
Could that be it? Might there have been too many goobers like me who inundated the site with hoards of shit and talking about the divets on a fucking golf ball? For the love of all that's good in the world, even Timothy Sexton fell for that shit. Might there have been every Harry Dick and Tom out there who read some obscure indie novel from someone nobody will ever hear of and placed a review on Yahoo! in order to support those obscure novelists? I've done a bunch of that. I even wrote one of those for Timothy Sexton.
So, who knows. The reasons are potentially voluminous and largely to do with money, no doubt. Perhaps we'll know before much longer. But for those who found a home for their writing at Yahoo! Voices and the other Yahoo! products, these are sad and painful times. Now the internet is just going to be inundated with pointless blog posts from goober bloggers, like me.
