For what it's worth, I asked them "[i]s Yahoo! going to have an Oscar Challenge this year for the 76th Academy Awards? The site still refers to the 75th."
They responded "[t]hank you for writing to Yahoo! Customer Care. At this point in time, we do not plan on a Yahoo! Oscar Pick game for 2004. We appreciate your interest and will forward your inquiry to our Production team as feedback as a suggestion for any future Oscar game plans."
I don't know why they dropped the contest this year, but I have a theory, which is that the much shorter interval between nominations and awards this year made it seem not worth their while. They'd need to update their contest framework for this year's awards, which would eat up some time, and they'd want to find sponsors for the contest.
I expect that participation in their annual contest builds slowly each winter, as initial registrants invite their friends. With only a few weeks worth of traffic at stake, and little time for that traffic to build to commercially significant levels.
Meanwhile, it took me less than half a day to set my contest up from scratch, I have no commercial motives, and nearly all of the participants are likely to be people who've heard of the contest directly from me. It was fun and fairly simple to do and the Oscars represent an annual guilty pleasure, so here we are!
Comments
I wonder why Yahoo isn't doing it this year?
Posted by: steve | February 9, 2004 11:44 AM
For what it's worth, I asked them "[i]s Yahoo! going to have an Oscar Challenge this year for the 76th Academy Awards? The site still refers to the 75th."
They responded "[t]hank you for writing to Yahoo! Customer Care. At this point in time, we do not plan on a Yahoo! Oscar Pick game for 2004. We appreciate your interest and will forward your inquiry to our Production team as feedback as a suggestion for any future Oscar game plans."
I don't know why they dropped the contest this year, but I have a theory, which is that the much shorter interval between nominations and awards this year made it seem not worth their while. They'd need to update their contest framework for this year's awards, which would eat up some time, and they'd want to find sponsors for the contest.
I expect that participation in their annual contest builds slowly each winter, as initial registrants invite their friends. With only a few weeks worth of traffic at stake, and little time for that traffic to build to commercially significant levels.
Meanwhile, it took me less than half a day to set my contest up from scratch, I have no commercial motives, and nearly all of the participants are likely to be people who've heard of the contest directly from me. It was fun and fairly simple to do and the Oscars represent an annual guilty pleasure, so here we are!
Posted by: Songdog | February 9, 2004 11:59 AM