UPDATE: Date/time stamps are back!
Tim Sykes posted about this on his blog (and gave the cool graphic here that I conveniently stole from his site) ….
Let’s face it. Yahoo’s business model is failing on many levels. They simply haven’t kept up with web trends and are being pummeled so hard by sites like Google, that there’s a chance their business may never recover.
So when they’re struggling, what do they decide to do? Bring in more visitors by making the site easier to use????
No! Yahoo decides to make the site less user-friendly! What are we talking about?
The one part of Yahoo’s site that is still great is the Finance portion. If you’re researching or following some stocks, you can easily get a ton of information via Yahoo. But they made a small change that is beyond annoying. They’ve taken off the time/date stamp for the news articles.
Hello! When someone is researching a stock, they want to look at the latest headlines. They want to see what news stories might have correlated with some movement in the stock price. And they don’t want to have to click on every single news story to see when it was published.
I think Tim is right… Yahoo is doing this to try to get more clicks. Instead of you, the reader, looking at a list of articles and passing because you see the latest one is from three days ago… now you’ve got to give them a few clicky-clicks on the articles and that boosts their numbers.
When your business model is failing, you do not alienate your users by making your system more cumbersome and less-user friendly. If you do, you might be getting some short-term clicks, but you’re sacrificing long-term loyalty and you’re giving your customers a reason to go elsewhere.
