Yahoo!7 has officially tied up with Xtra- to create Yahoo!Xtra for New Zealand, launching March 1, 2007. With Yaho0!7 owning 51% of the JV there is hope for a great site.
But early signs of the continued amateur hour are a non-existent yahooxtra.co.nz site, although at least AJ PArk has registered yahooxtra.co.nz and yahooxtra.com (and xtrayahoo.com). Meanwhile Yahoo!7’s Australian site is pretty good.
One down side of this is that Yahoo!7 Australia does not subscribe to the Net Neilsen traffic statistics – something that all the major online players in New Zealand do. They may find it difficult to sell advertising without the Net Neilsen tracking, so we could be seeing an attempted shake up in the way we measure traffic here. I really hope that Yahoo!7 plays ball – the alternatives such as Hitwise and customer panels are appalling, and the accepted tracking methodology makes one less thing to worry about.
Lance Wiggs 