Michael Barrett, former Google director and media guru, has been hired by Yahoo! Inc. as Chief Revenue Officer. His new role in the company will be to guide the site back into a direction it once took in the past. Yahoo hopes to go back to being a primary site for entertainment and information news and are aiming to also bring in advertising profits.
Yahoo's goal is to make the transition from being considered a technology company to being a more media focused company. The biggest part of Yahoo's new plan entails creating their own video content to help bring in profit and prompt syndication deals.
This is one of CEO Ross Levinsohn's biggest appointments since becoming Chief Executive Office. However, this will not be the first time Barrett and Levinsohn have worked together. At one point they both worked at Fox Interactive Media where Barrett was Chief Revenue Officer and directed profits for entities such as MySpace. His former position at Google consisted of him directing integration efforts.
Barrett will start his new position at Yahoo in July and will lead others in the revenue and operations department.
Yahoo has been struggling in the past years to compete against web giants such as Facebook and Google. Search-based ads have now been bringing in the largest profits and have taken revenue from generic display advertising, which is what Yahoo is big on. Although online advertising continues to grow rapidly, Yahoo has not been as highly favored by advertisers, who tend to flock more heavily towards its two biggest competitors.
Yahoo's new shift towards video ads and its appointment of Barrett, may be the change the company needs to help foster its market growth.
