What do you know, Yahoo actually found the time among its busy threatening schedule and after a long while (really long while) it is launching some new product…
Yesterday, Yahoo has announced it is taking out Yahoo! Small Business Advisor out from its beta release after a few months it was in testings (probably to examine how users react and engage with it). Yahoo saying that so far it is already generated 4 million page views in just three months.
What is it exactly Yahoo! Small Business Advisor? This is essentially an online destination under Yahoo Small Business (the “IDEAS & ADVICE” tab) which is dedicated to entrepreneurs. It aggregates relevant news and articles from all Yahoo sites, offers unique contents from famous entrepreneurs and contains a few tools.
I have been browsing through this site for about an hour or two and I think it is pretty safe to characterized it as a giant content site full with articles covering all kinds of small business categories such as sales & marketing, management, legal, finance, technology and even a section about the 2012 election (from the business angle of course).
Many of the articles on the site are taken from respectable business-oriented sources like Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur which offers quality contents in general. From what I saw I can say that there are many excellent articles on the site, although there is also a minority of useless ones (all the familiar “tips”, “reasons” and “ways” lists).
While I was browsing through this giant content source (I will not say content farm just yet), I couldn’t help thinking about Yahoo’s chopped off Associated Content that also contained enormous amount of articles, however, there are major differences in the level of high-quality articles quantity between the two sources.
I was pretty disappointed from the tools section. After finding many useful articles on the other sections, I expected to find some practical tools as well. However, all of what this section includes is just a few package tracking features, loan calculator and a Zip Code lookup. Nothing really useful in this section…
Other nice additions this site has are Facebook Connect to see how the user’s friends are engaging with the site’s contents (by Yahoo Social Bar), Yahoo’s personalized content algorithm (C.O.R.E.) and integration with Yahoo Answers (I can’t say I’m too thrilled about this feature).
Overall, Yahoo! Small Business Advisor is basically a giant high-quality (well, mostly high-quality) small business content site.