After a 14 month or so hiatus that coincided with my tenure at Yahoo! — I am excited to be back blogging on a semi-regular basis.

It was a great experience running Yahoo! News, Tech, and Education after the sale of BuzzTracker - and I was proud to be part of a ton of progress both from a product and financial results perspective.  BuzzTracker is now live on every (brand new) Yahoo! News story page — powering the Most Blogged About module — and it is gratifying to see the technology we developed being used by over 40MM Unique Users, according to Comscore, every month.  I also had the opportunity to see the world-class talent and power of the Yahoo! Front Page and Network up close.  And it is truly impressive.  The talent and opportunities are all in place to turn the company and it’s fortunes — and I wish Yahoo! the best of luck in doing so!

As I said many times over the past year — when you are running a media business you fundamentally have three levers:  Reach, Engagement, and Monetization.  Yahoo! has cracked the code on the toughest lever to succeed at — Reach — and I firmly believe that through focus and desire Monetization and Engagement are easily attainable.  They key is to not fall prey to the false choice of “user experience vs. monetization,” but rather to seek to drive up metrics for both.  I fully expect Yahoo! to build on its great investments of the past few years (APT, RightMedia, BlueLithium, BuzzTracker) to start driving Operating Cash Flow in a significant way and I look forward to watching it happen!

Look for me on twitter:  alanwarms –

I am excited to announce that I am joining Yahoo! to run Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com) as Vice President and General Manager. Yahoo! is also acquiring BuzzTracker.com and related technologies as well as bringing on all Participate Media staff.

The decision to sell the business and move to Yahoo! was relatively simple. As anyone playing in the online space understands, online media is all about scale. The ability to garner real CPMs, the ability to sell ads directly, the ability to provide innovative solutions to advertisers, all depend on having tens of millions of unique visitors. As the Publisher of BuzzTracker.com and before that RealClearPolitics.com, that point has been drilled into my consciousness over the past two years. Yahoo! News is the leader in online news — the number one player according to both ComScore and HitWise, and I am extremely excited to come aboard as General Manager and have the opportunity to drive value from News, extend Yahoo!’s leadership position and contribute to their commitment to being more open by bringing the best content from across the web. I also get the opportunity, with my team, to bring BuzzTracker, the blogs we cover, and our thousands of granular topical content feeds to millions of users and thousands of advertisers.

Follow the discussion of the transaction at BuzzTracker.

Yesterday (March 12, 2007) was our last day as Publisher for RealClearPolitics. As was reported in PaidContent a month ago, the investor group I led sold our stake in RealClearPolitics back to the founders earlier this year…and stepping down as Publisher is a natural consequence of that transaction. It was a great investment for us; and we are confident that RealClearPolitics has a very bright future ahead going into the 2008 Presidential Election.

John McIntyre and Tom Bevan have done a fantastic job building up RealClearPolitics, and we’re proud to have been a part of the success in the past year. Since we became involved in September of 2005:
– we launched a new, “micro-chunked” site built on Movable Type (Fred Wilson talked about it here)
– we executed distribution deals with Yahoo!, OpinionJournal, Forbes, FoxNews, and Time Inc.
– we developed key new technologies used by RealClearPolitics including BuzzTracker, ReaderArticles, and a myriad of Polling tools
– Page views and unique visitors more than doubled
– we signed up additional web sites to be repped by RealClearPolitics
– Revenue quintupled

(all posts on RealClearPolitics)

RealClearPolitics is well positioned as the leading independent political web site heading into what is certain to be a historic 18 months. The technology base and business model is in great shape, and I am looking forward to seeing the evolution of the site and the can’t-be-beat election coverage.

We wish John and Tom the best of luck moving forward — and we’ll still be powering the FoxNews/RealClearPolitics Buzztracker!