One area where Yahoo! has fervently tried to differentiate itself from larger competitor Google has been the customer relationship experience. While Google provides simplistic and insightful web-based products that work, are easy to use, and have unobtrusive advertising, Yahoo! goes for the more personal customer relationship with its customers. Yahoo! provides a more "personalized" web experience where it tries to cater to the varying individualistic demands from its hundreds of millions of customers every day. This is no small order indeed.

<soapbox on> One thing, however, that turns me off of Yahoo! is the in-your-face advertising present at every turn. It's true that most Yahoo! services are free -- and must be paid for somehow (hence: ads), but Google manages to do much of this (albeit through just a single mode: search ads) without being annoying or distracting. </soapbox off>.

In that vein, college football season us now underway, with the first full weekend of college gridiron happening this Labor Day weekend. Yahoo!'s Fantasy Football is a great example of the Internet company providing a highly value-added product to its customer base here in the U.S. that coincides with an extremely popular fall activity. In addition, pro football begins regularly on September 7th next week, so Fantasy Football is really about to get into full swing. While the games, stats and pickings are virtual, the actual prizes of being at the top of your game in a Fantasy league are real -- to the tune of large monetary prizes (up to $25,000).

This is a great example of where Yahoo! delineates itself from competitors Microsoft and Google. Offerings such as Fantasy Football draw in very niche audiences and hopefully make these audiences "sticky" to other areas of the Yahoo! portal as well, which is the end goal. Maybe Yahoo! is on to something when trying to form a more complete relationship with each and every customer. If Yahoo! can make more of its offerings work like Fantasy Football, YHOO shareholders could see ever-increasing customers "stick" to Yahoo! every day. This would be a good thing if Yahoo! can continue to take advantage of it -- just get rid of the distracting ads!