Still A Media Company, Kind Of: Yahoo Is Betting Big On 2012 Olympics Coverage

So it’s Day Two for new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and whew boy she’s got a lot of stuff to work through. We’ll give her some time to get her feet wet. In the meantime, Yahoo is still doing its Yahoo thing, which includes trying to decide whether its a technology or a media company.* The latest evidence that Yahoo is all about media, at least for now? An ambitious push to get people psyched up about the Olympics using its services.

Yahoo’s pushing its “Beyond Gold” coverage from the 2012 Olympics Games, with content available online and on various other apps and screens. The whole thing starts with Yahoo Sports, which will have a subsection called Yahoo Hub. That site will be available on PCs, mobile, and tablet browsers, and will feature breaking news, photos, highlights, reporting and analysis from the Games.

In addition to the web and mobile web, Yahoo will have Olympics news and features on native apps. That includes the IntoNow app, which Yahoo acquired last year. Users of the second-screen app will be able to sync it up with TV coverage, to get medal counts and images from the Games, as well as Twitter commentary and trivia to keep viewers engaged. Yahoo’s Sportacular app will also feature a special tab with personalized access to news and information about the Games.

Oh, there’s also a connected TV element, for those of you who bought HDTVs from Vizio or whomever with Yahoo Connected TV as the operating system. It’s adding a Beyond Gold app for those users, providing them with all the same news, scores, medal counts, yada yada. You know, in case they can’t just wait 15 minutes for NBC to cut to a commercial break and remind us all where the whole world stands.

Yahoo’s partly interested in the Olympics because, well, it sells well for the company. It claims to be NUMBER 1!!! in Olympics coverage worldwide since the 2006 Turin Games. For the Vancouver Games in 2010, Yahoo Sports had 32 million unique visitors, while in 2008 it had 38.5 million for the Beijing games. And, well, that means a lot of advertising revenue.

* It’s worth noting that in the press release the company describes itself as “Yahoo!, the technology powered [sic] media company.” So I guess it’s trying to have things both ways?