by Jon Elvekrog, CEO

Carol Bartz’s abrupt departure from Yahoo has a lot of people talking about how this moment gives the struggling portal the chance to become a media company again. Ideas are swirling: Should Yahoo buy Hulu? Should they merge with News Corp.?

Those intriguing possibilities make great headlines for the trade publications, but this line of thinking – Hulu, News Corp, or becoming a media company – is a mistake.

Yahoo is in the business of providing information (you might actually say it’s a portal to information) and it’s really good at this business. Yahoo Finance is great. Yahoo Sports is pretty nice. Yahoo Games is pretty strong among the social game companies that have not kept up with Zynga. Messenger and Mail are both strong franchises as well. This information attracts an audience, which Yahoo can sell. But it needs to stop there, rather than try to become an enterprise that produces the media it tries to sell.

Yahoo is a company that creates cool products and uses technology to organize information in ways that build a loyal audience. It’s not Hollywood, and that’s why Terry Semel was a bad choice to run the company for most of the 2000s.

Yahoo needs a product CEO who can leverage technology to grow new or existing audiences. That’s not possible in search, which Yahoo should probably outsource to Google like they did in the old days and start making more money than they currently do with Microsoft.

By freeing itself of search and making additional profit, Yahoo could actually go out and acquire valuable companies to bolster its product offering. Around a year ago, Google bought the social gaming company Slide for close to $200 million. Just last week, Google killed all of Slide’s products to concentrate on Google+. It surprised many people in the Valley, but for me it seemed like a huge missed opportunity for Yahoo.

Had Yahoo gone all in a year ago and bought Slide, it would have inherited a cool set of products along with Max Levchin, a smart technology lead who could have transformed the company from a stumbling “media” empire back into a company with killer products. But that didn’t happen, Google killed Slide, and now Levchin works for neither company.

Hypothetical or not, Yahoo needs to capitalize on these kinds of opportunities. It’s fairly easy to understand why the media are having fun prognosticating about Yahoo’s future as a media company – Yahoo itself is confused about the matter. In reality, we need to think about Yahoo not as a media clearinghouse, but as a conduit to a great audience.

Media companies develop and generate content, like editorial copy or video. Newspapers are media companies, and the current idea of a “newspaper” can easily be split into two different models. There are papers filled with investigative reporting, such as The New York Times and The Economist, and then there are content re-packagers who modify and reconstruct existing content in new and interesting ways, like Huffington Post, TMZ and Bleacher Report.

In reality, the former group will only exist via a subscription model, because they have to cover overhead costs. Investigative journalism takes months of reporting and the ability to cover stories both near and far requires international and regional bureaus.

The re-packagers, meanwhile, have such a low cost structure that they can easily survive on fewer page views and smaller audiences. TV networks operate in a similar fashion by developing content in the hopes of attracting a big audience they can sell to advertisers.

But Silicon Valley is not the newspaper industry, nor is it primetime TV, and big technology companies like Yahoo cannot create the same hit-driven content that we expect from TV networks or traditional newspapers.

But Yahoo is already a hit-driven business with several successes that already attract large audiences, including mail and games. If it wants to survive on ad revenue, Yahoo can’t focus on manufacturing media. The struggling portal can sell its technology audiences and compete for advertising dollars, and that’s the end of the story. Technology and media companies are not the same, so let’s stop expecting a cat to bark.