Posts filed under 'Yahoo'
Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Web Analytics yesterday as announced in the following blog post.
This product was formerly known as IndexTools, a company Yahoo! acquired a year and a half ago. It’s not just IndexTools with a new logo though, there is new additional functionality and upgraded functionality as noted with the “New Feature” tag on the features page. Some of those new features include Visitor Demographic Reports, Visitor Behavioral Reports, and Advanced Data visualization.
Yahoo! Web Analytics is not open yet to everyone though, it’s available and free for search and display advertisers currently working with Yahoo!. In my opinion, and the opinion of others less biased such as CMS Watch, it’s a better enterprise product than Google Analytics.
April 30th, 2009
Good story over the weekend in the New York Times about the newspapers success with APT from Yahoo!. I actually was walking right by Hilary and Lem coming from the cafeteria at Yahoo! when they were taking these photos.
The newspaper industry is obviously going through major pains right now, along with the rest of the economy, but there are some definite bright spots into how they can adapt and thrive in the future through encouraging and mastering local online advertising.
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March 2nd, 2009
Cool announcement from my employer today, as they’ve announced the beta testing of “Rich Ads” in search results.
There’s a few things I am liking about this:
- The addition of video, images, and form input boxes can actually provide a lot of help and value to a user searching for specific information. The ability to watch a Pedigree commercial without leaving the search results page is helpful and interactive. Or how about entering your zip code for an Esurance quote?
- It is innovation in an area that actually hasn’t seen that much innovation for an area that has so much business being done through it. It’ll be fascinating to see testing results from this.
- If done well, I imagine it will provide better results and more interaction for the advertiser.
I can’t wait to see this roll out more and hear about the results.
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February 19th, 2009
Jawad Shuaib wrote a guest post for ReadWriteWeb today called “What Yahoo Must Do to Survive”, and I thought it was worth some comments as I have some disagreements with it.
First, for disclosure purposes, I work for Yahoo! running the product marketing for our display ad platforms. This gives me some internal perspective, but also may leave me somewhat biased for many reasons. Additionally, I have no special insight into what the search business at Yahoo is doing, nor do I control overall company strategy. Display ad platform strategy is a different story.
That being said, the summary of Jawad’s article is that Yahoo! should abandon many of its efforts in multiple areas in order to refocus on search (and I assume search monetization).
I’ve heard this strategy a few times. My main thoughts accompanied with some questions are:
1. Is search a battle Yahoo! can win and gain back significant market share?
I think Yahoo! has done some great things recently like opening up search with BOSS, but Google has effectively become the consumer brand of choice. It will take something major to change that. It can happen, and perhaps Yahoo! can do it, but is it the most likely bet for the company to succeed?
I’m not sure succeeding in search is a matter of Yahoo! not putting enough resources against it or a lack of focus. Perhaps it was a lack of resources and focus three years ago when the market share gap was closer, but I think now it will take a radical innovation that changes the way people search to unseat Google. Yahoo! could do it, but I don’t think it needs the entire company’s focus to make that happen.
2. Yahoo’s strength and success over the past couple of years has been in building amazing web properties that lead their vertical and then monetizing those properties through display ads. These properties also help drive/maintain search market share from users visiting the properties using Yahoo’s search which is integrated into them. One common business theme is that a company should focus on its strengths. Would abandoning those things to focus on search satisfy that?
Now to address some of Jawad’s specific points:
To remain a profitable business, Yahoo! needs to refocus on the search market. The primary revenue generator for both Yahoo! and Google is search and its highly coveted advertising space. The search market, in other words, is the lifeblood of the company’s business model.
Lifeblood is too strong a word. The display and services businesses at Yahoo! are not small potatoes. Of course Yahoo! should be concerned about search market share dropping, but it’s not the only thing going.
Worse yet, the company seems to be everywhere at once, investing in a dizzying array of services that do little to enhance its search standing. What does a search and advertising company need with Flickr, Yahoo! Greetings, Yahoo! Personals, Del.icio.us, Yahoo! Pets, Blo.gs, Upcoming.org, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! 360, or Webjay?
I’d agree that the company has invested in too many areas. A couple of the aforementioned properties have already been shuttered, others got hit hard in recent layoffs, and I expect 2009 will trim it up even more. One thing to remember though, is that many of the properties and services don’t require massive investments to keep them operating and profitable.
These services have, thus far, offered little value to Yahoo!. The company has spent its time and resources maintaining services with a huge, financially unjustified overhead; all the while, its search market share continues to dwindle. In contrast, Google, realizing its product line was stretched too thin, has spent the past 2 years aggressively vertically integrating its various product offerings as features ported across its services. While Google has certainly expanded its horizon, advertising and search technology remain its unwavering focus.
Some of the services may have not offered a ton of value, but others have added tremendous value. I’d argue Google has also expanded beyond their core focus. Google Docs isn’t really search or advertising related, etc. Yahoo! has also always been more of a consumer portal from the start. It didn’t start as a core search business like Google.
Yahoo! needs to refocus on the search market. The digital dinosaur is simply not in the position to continue experimenting or investing in markets that it doesn’t already have a significant command of. By spending time and money building a gamut of Web 2.0 services, Yahoo! is unnecessarily competing with hundreds of companies, when it should be competing with just two: Google and Microsoft. The company should let users build the content and focus instead on helping others effectively find it.
I don’t think Yahoo! is really heavily investing in Web 2.0 technologies at this point, and didn’t really in 2008 either. The companies it did buy before that like Flickr and Delicious have continued to be successful assets that were bought very cheaply. Letting the users build the content is also very much a Web 2.0 idea that Jawab is arguing they should move away from. I think the right path there is to focus on high value audiences and combine the creation of good unique content with also empowering users to contribute content. I’m not in the audience business either though…
Should Yahoo! continue to lose market share in search, the company will be unable to continue its operations elsewhere. Shutting down or selling off ineffective segments of its operation, such as Yahoo! Music, would go a long way towards retaining profitability and reigniting the search effort. Such cuts would undoubtedly require significant staff reductions; unfortunately, though, with dwindling profits and a bad economy, Yahoo! simply cannot afford to continue operating like the bloated behemoth it is today.
Again, many of these properties don’t require much investment, but I agree with the general statement here that Yahoo! should cut properties that aren’t profitable and focus on a smaller number of areas. The company has already been making this move throughout 2008 and I suspect it will continue through 2009. Probably every technology company should listen to that advice in 2009.
This is not to say that Yahoo! is doomed. Apple found itself in much the same situation around 1997, only to see a resurgence under the leadership of the resurrected Steve Jobs. Yahoo! is in desperate need of fresh direction under a leader like Jobs if it is to win the battle against other giants. Yahoo! does not need a new religion. In fact, it needs to rediscover what it lost to ambition. It isn’t too late yet, but Yahoo! needs to get off its butt and start fighting for its life.
I imagine a new CEO will provide some of this leadership, but I’m also not sure Apple is a great comparison. I think Jobs actually helped provide new innovation at Apple, but I’m not an expert on their story.
Jawab’s theme is correct that Yahoo! does need to think hard about what it wants to do and streamline and focus on that. I just disagree with the conclusion that focusing only on search is the answer.
January 1st, 2009
My employer Yahoo! announced today they’ve launched Yahoo! Web Analytics which was formally known as IndexTools.
The product is rolling out to various customer segments through the rest of year. It looks like Yahoo! Small Business merchants, advertisers making microsites, and developer partners will be the first to get access. I believe previoius IndexTools customers already have active accounts.
As an analytics nut, I must admit I’m ashamed to have not used it, although I did give IndexTools a test run before the Yahoo! acquisition. From my experience I felt like as a free product under Yahoo! it was a more powerful application than Google Analytics, so I think it will be well received in the analytics market.
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October 8th, 2008
I haven’t been posting much to this blog lately unfortunately, and there are some legitimate reasons why.
First, adding a third kid in Caiden to the family has definitely cut down on the free time that much more. He stays up later than my older girls which makes it a bit harder to fit in blog posts at night.
Second, work has been absolutely crazy as my team has had a big role in the new ad management platform APT from Yahoo!. It’s going to be pretty exciting watching this product grow, get rolled out to customers, and make real progress in the display advertising business. I don’t think the market and media are grasping what it is exactly yet and how it will help both Yahoo! and its clients, but that will come in time.
Anyway, I hope to get some more posts on this blog in related to the advertising industry and web publishing business, and I have been publishing quicker personal and business thoughts at Twitter which also funnels through to Facebook if you care to get more updates there.
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September 30th, 2008
Yahoo! just announced that they’ve sent over 100M visits to the Newspaper Consortium from Yahoo! sites. The Consortium is a partnership of holding companies that contains 770 local newspapers. And apparently they are pretty happy about getting links to their articles throughout Yahoo!
“It’s very exciting when our news makes it to Yahoo.com’s top features,” said Anthony Moor, Deputy Managing Editor, Interactive, The Dallas Morning News, and editor of dallasnews.com. “It’s like a firehose blasting us with up to 800,000 page views in just a couple of hours. We’ve had placements that have accounted for up to 27 percent of the day’s page views, and 65 percent of the day’s unique visitors.”
When I read this article the first question that came to my mind was how much ad revenue Yahoo! created for the Consortium through that traffic, so it’s time for some back of the envelope math!
(Note, I have no inside information or statistics and these are all just estimated guesses).
1. Yahoo! has sent 100 million visits to Consortium websites.
2. Let’s assume an average page views per visit at a conservative 3 pages viewed per visit which gives us an estimated 300 million page views created.
3. Some brief viewing of newspaper sites gives me an average of around 5 ad impressions per page. That gives us a total of 1.5 billion ad impressions created.
4. A portion of those impressions are going to be sold at high CPM rates, while a portion will be sold at lower non-guaranteed rates below $1. How much depends on the individual newspapers and the strength of their salesforces. This is a tough one to estimate, but let’s just say the average nets out to a $2 CPM overall.
Divide 1.5 billion by 1000 to get 1.5 million. Then multiply by $2 to get a total of $3 million dollars that Yahoo! has provided in direct ad revenue.
Conclusion
Obviously if you change any of those numbers they’re so large the results change dramatically, but I feel like this is at least a decent estimate of direct revenue. That of course doesn’t tell the whole story as many users may become return visitors, bookmark sites, visit sponsored sections, or provide revenue to the newspaper in other ways.
“More than the bursts and spikes, sharing our content with Yahoo! brings a steady growth in traffic to our site, which provides us with more inventory to sell to our advertisers,” said Jon Beck, Vice President, Online Advertising and Business Development, The New York Daily News. “Our overall partnership with Yahoo! has been game-changing, and has brought new energy to our content and business.”
That’s exciting stuff to hear for Yahoo!. I think it’s also one advantage they have over Google and others in advertising relationship is the ability to create partnerships that go beyond just direct monetization to provide value to publishers in many ways. It’s going to be interesting to watch as Yahoo! gets more aggressive in opening up their own sites to traffic partnerships and advertising deals.
July 30th, 2008
Read/Write Web points to some interesting data from Comscore showing that Yahoo! Buzz is surpassing Digg in traffic, engagement, and also has a more balanced demographic.
First, I’d say to never trust just one statistics service, but it is safe to say that it looks like Yahoo! Buzz is a winner thus far in it’s growth and shows what Yahoo! can do with it’s audience when they execute something well. Buzz is probably far from Digg in being a known brand in the “social news” space, but does that matter if you’re introducing social news to the rest of the internet beyond the technology elite?
May 14th, 2008
Yesterday was a bit crazy. A lot of news hit, and most of it I can’t really say much about. Just a little rundown though:
Yahoo! Acquires IndexTools
This blog originally started with a focus on web analytics, so it’s near and dear to my heart. I’m excited to see how IndexTools is used both internally and externally for Yahoo!. Web analytics expert Eric Petersen has a good post about why this could be a game changer.
Former Yahoo! SVP Tim Cadogan Becomes CEO at OpenX
A great hire for OpenX, as I really enjoyed working with Tim while he was at Yahoo!. OpenX is a very interesting business right now, it’ll be fun to watch what Tim does there.
Yahoo! Tests Outsourcing Search Monetization With Google
No comment.
Yahoo! And AOL To Merge?
No comment.
NewsCorp To Join Microsoft In Yahoo! Offer?
No comment, man this blog is exciting.
AOL and Ad.com Jump Into the Small Publisher Game With PubAccess
Not too long ago I remember it was a bunch of fairly standard ad networks as the only options for small publishers. Then we launched Direct Media Exchange (formerly RMX Direct) at Right Media which was the first “tool” to help publisher manage multiple ad networks and make their lives easier. Since then we’ve seen more in this space like The Rubicon Project, PubMatic, now PubAccess, and Google’s AdManager in a less direct way. I don’t think we’ll see the last of it either.
Definitely not a slow news day in the world of Yahoo!
April 10th, 2008
Yahoo! has just gone public with AMP!, as pointed out in the New York Times by Miguel Helft.
The nice thing is now when talking with others outside Yahoo! they’ll have a bit more understanding of one of the major efforts I’m working on. Of course, there will be questions and confusion, for example Mashable saying it seems a lot like Google Adsense. I know Mashable is going off of very little information, but I thought I’d just note that’s not accurate at all. Watching the early preview video below should give a bit more feel of the direction the platform is moving.
April 6th, 2008
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