Yahoo usually gets it right. Why else would Microsoft be trying to buy them for $44.6 Billion?  However, Yahoo recently made a move that really irritated their sports content readers. It was a move motivated by profit, that actually may cost them money in the long run.  Luckily, we have their bad example to help keep us from making the same mistake. (Hopefully)

The problem started when Yahoo formed an agreement with Rivals.com to place college football and basketball content on Yahoo’s team pages.  It’s an interesting marriage because one company has created a subscriber based business model (Rivals) and the other thrives on providing free content supported by ads and up selling users various services and tools (Yahoo).  Unfortunately, Yahoo chose to rss feed the subscription content to its own pages.

Why does it matter? Imagine reading an interesting headline on your favorite college page on Yahoo. You click the link (which isn’t marked as premium content) and you get two more sentences and a sales pitch to read the rest of the article. Now, your ticked. Yahoo has wasted your time. You’ve been conditioned by Yahoo to expect to read articles for free. And now you’re mad at Yahoo and Rivals.  Do this enough times, and you find one of the many other sports news outlets.

The lesson in this is that Yahoo spent years training visitors to accept a particular model: Read our stories for free, put up with a few ads in the margin. Any partnership that disrupts this model costs readers. For nonprofits, it is a reminder that we can’t force donors to interact with us in a way that’s contrary to their conditioned expectations. They might not come back.