BusinessWeek just released its annual “Best of the Web” user survey. Among the most beloved sites are some of the properties housed at our Santa Monica operations — Finance, Games, Health, Music, News. Since opening our office here five years ago, we’ve established a center of excellence by having Yahoos in residence in a major media capital. And our users and partners continue to benefit.

Today we’re planning some changes that also have our user and customer experiences in mind. We are streamlining the structure of one portion of our Santa Monica presence — our entertainment division — with a vision of offering a more integrated entertainment experience. That means we’ll be creating more synergies between our music, games, movies, TV, and omg! properties, making them more personal and engaging for entertainment hounds.

Also, rather than staffing entertainment business units around distinct properties, we’re freeing up resources to feed new areas of focus. We’ll be investing in the development of next gen media platforms, applications and services, creating cool new opportunities for third-party publishers and media companies while also harnessing the power of social media and user-generated content. For instance, consider the Yahoo! Music Video application on Facebook. Or bringing big entertainment brands to life online. Or making it effortless for big networks and studios to put their hottest video content in front of all our users, both on network and off.

A consolidated entertainment team also means increased accountability, faster decision-making, better focus, and the ability to staff our engineering, product, and design muscle against our most important priorities. And it allows us to redeploy our talent against big bets in other parts of the company. We’ll continue to look for areas to sharpen our focus.

We think this new approach is not only good for business, it’s better for our users. And we hope that continues to keep our properties in the company of the best.

Vince Broady
Head of Entertainment and Video

Photo from lauradahl.