Yahoo! Media VP Jimmy Pitaro on ‘Quick Snacks’

Yahoo! Media vice president Jimmy Pitaro spoke with E.B. Boyd for the So What Do You Do section of WebNewser parent mediabistro.com, during which he discussed Yahoo!’s wrap-up shows, such as Prime Time in No Time and Tech Ticker.

Pitaro’s take on the wrap-up shows follows below, but for the entire interview with Boyd, please click here:

All of our data tells us that our audience wants quick snacks. They’re not that interested in consuming 22-minute sitcoms or one-hour dramas. The key point, though, is that we program based on audience insights. If you look at how Prime Time in No Time and Tech Ticker were launched, they were really low-risk opportunities for us. What we saw in entertainment was that, the morning after American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, search volume around those shows exploded. People wanted to know what happened last night, who got voted off. We were constantly reacting and producing stories around the content, scratching and clawing to find stories from content partners.

We found that it wasn’t really scaling, so we decided to just create programming that met that audience need. Prime Time in No Time was launched to address our users’ huge appetite for knowing what happened last night in reality television. With Tech Ticker, we saw a lot of interest on Yahoo! around tech stocks. One of our most popular areas in Yahoo! Finance is quotes pages. We launched that show knowing that there was a huge demand for that kind of content.

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