'Net Features : yahoo

Flickr Gives Users Space

Allison Howen — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:21:00 GMT

Although Yahoo has been in the news this week because of its billion dollar acquisition of Tumblr, the company has also revealed some big changes to its photo-sharing service Flickr.

The most noteworthy update is that Flickr is now offering its users a free terabyte of space. This is huge, as the Flickr blog states, “We believe you should share all your images in full resolution, so life’s moments can be relived in their original quality. No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat. We’re giving your photos room to breathe, and you the space to upload a dizzying number of photos and videos, for free. Just how big is a terabyte? Well, you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.”

In addition to a free terabyte of space, Flickr has unveiled a redesigned platform. The new interactive design features an Activity Feed that displays a combination of the recent activity on a user’s photos with their friends’ updates. Plus, users can add a customizable cover photo and high-resolution profile picture to their Photostream, as well as leverage the platform’s new Slideshare mode to view a showcase of photos.

It is also important to mention that users can now upload 1080p HD quality videos that are up to three minutes in length. Moreover, the photo-sharing site has added to its mobile application offering, which already includes an iOS app, by launching an Android app that allows users to interact, share and view photos.

That being said, only time will tell if a terabyte of space and new design will be enough to attract more photographers to the site – and along with the aquisition of Tumblr, more people back to Yahoo in the long run.

Yahoo! Acquires Tumblr in Billion Dollar Data Play

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:45:00 GMT

News broke over the weekend that Yahoo! would acquire blogging platform Tumblr for approximately $1.1 billion.

Many in the business and technology industry believe the acquisition is a smart one for Yahoo! (but it has its detractors too). Tumblr now has more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day. It's not just those raw numbers however, but likely the engagement metrics that Yahoo! was most interested in tapping into.

Tumblr sees in excess of 900 posts per second and 24 billion minutes are spent on the site each month. But it gets even better from the perspective of Yahoo, who has its sights set clearly on mobile, as more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the platform's mobile app and do an average of 7 sessions per day.

The deal offers interesting opportunities for both companies. Tumblr will be able to deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help users discover creators, curators, and content and Tumblr in turn will bring 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. Expect the two companies to start working on creating advertising opportunities immediately.

Reports from early this morning indicate that Yahoo-Tumblr will have advertising on the network as early as 2014. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer revealed that she doesn't care if Tumblr visitors don't visit Yahoo!, which indicates (at least to me) that, thanks to Yahoo's aggressive behavioral marketing and personalization efforts, this may be more about acquiring an audience (advertising inventory) to leverage its relatively robust advertising technology.

If you're not on Tumblr yet, you may want to check out Website Magazine's 5 Tips for Taking Over Tumblr.

Yahoo Ad Units Place Sponsored Content in Redesigned News Stream

Michael Garrity — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Web media and technology company Yahoo announced that it was launching two brand new in-stream ad unit formats: one for desktops and mobile devices, and another standard billboard-type ad.

In a move that is similar to the Sponsored Stories ads that Facebook rolled out a while ago, Yahoo’s new “Stream Ads” are native ad types that will feature sponsored posts appearing in the content stream on the freshly redesigned Yahoo homepage; the ads will also show up in as news summaries in the updated Yahoo mobile application.

Of course, it’s not all about Yahoo finding a way to line its pockets (just mostly). The company also has its users, and their interests, in mind.

“The more our users spend time with Yahoo, the more relevant and personalized the content and advertising become,” said Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer. “Stream Ads are the sponsored twin to our newsfeed articles and are every bit as personalized and engaging.”

Stream Ads will appear in the news feed and closely resemble the other articles, including having a headline, synopsis and thumbnail image. The only differences will be a slight shading, a “Sponsored” label at the bottom and an AdChoice icon in the upper right-hand corner.

Currently, these Stream Ads only include text and an image, and Yahoo hasn’t provided any pricing details yet.

The company also hasn’t offered pricing information on the new, more traditional billboard-style ads that are at the top of the Yahoo homepage, which Mayer said could be used by advertisers to display more rich and interactive content.

What Internet Retailers Spend on Paid Search

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:31:00 GMT

Paid search is a significant driver of impressions for Internet retailers but acquiring users through the channel certainly does not come cheap.

Search engine intelligence provider AdGooroo released a thought-provoking infographic on the paid search retail universe which breaks down the $2.3 billion dollars spent on performance advertising (full year 2012 for AdWords combined with half-year 2012 for Yahoo! Bing) by retail category.

“Mass retailers” collectively spent a whopping $490 million and as a result received far and away the most impressions of any retail category according to AdGooroo which calculated that Amazon, Target, Wal-Mart, jcpenney and Macy’s racked up a whopping 13 billion impressions in total.

Adgooroo also took a closer look at the 2012 paid search spend for specific retail categories – a useful exercise in determining sector growth potential and current competitiveness. Besides the $490 million for mass retailers (approximately 21% of the total spend), six retail categories spent over $100 million including Apparel & Fashion ($271M), Consumer Electronics ($202M), Home Improvement ($155M), Stationary, Greeting Cards & Printing ($150M), Beauty & Cosmetics ($101M), and Shoes ($100M). Spend for Sporting Goods ($94M), Jewelry ($78M), and Flowers/Mail Order Gifts ($80M) also made a respectable showing to round out the list.

An AdSense Threat from Bing-Yahoo

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:15:00 GMT

Several years after nixing its fledgling text-based (contextual) ad product, Yahoo’s Publisher Network (YPN) – a competitor to Google’s AdSense – is on its way back. With recent reports that Adsense publishers are earning less these days, the timely release could be quite fortuitous for both advertisers and publishers.

With the launch of Yahoo Bing Network Contextual Ads, through a partnership with Media.net, the company will place contextually-relevant text ads on websites – just like Adsense. The combined companies have a sizable group of advertisers who currently buy millions of search ad impressions daily through the Yahoo Bing Network (YBN) on both Yahoo and Bing.

Media.net will manage the publishers (affiliates) interested in serving ads from the YBN, and YBN will manage the technology, operations and advertiser relationships. Publishers, who need to request an invite and be approved for participation, will use the self-serve platform to create and customize ad units as well as for access to the real-time reporting. Publishers will also have a fair amount of control thanks to Media.net’s prowess in page-level ad targeting and dynamic optimization.

I’ve been very critical of Yahoo in the past (most of it was warranted), most forcefully about it shuttering YPN. The Web ecosystem demanded a product of this type nearly six or seven years ago when the program launched and it was a harbinger of bad tidings when the program officially closed – which never should have happened. In fact, I believe it to be one of the primary reasons that Google pulled so far ahead at the time in terms of advertising revenue. Whether or not the YBN/Media.net program succeeds is anyone’s guess, count on interest from digital workers and some excitement about the possibilities.

Sample Ads from the Yahoo Bing Network:

Developer Apps Get Hyper-Local with Geo-Friendly Yahoo! BOSS

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 22:30:00 GMT

Right alongside mobile and social, local is the area where developers are investing their energy and venture capitalists their dollars. Local, anything local, is big business and in the past year the development has only accelerated.

A recent example of this can be found at Yahoo!. The company's BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) just announced BOSS Geo, a new addition to its Search API comprised of two rather powerful geo-related services now available for BOSS developers.

PlaceFinder is a geo-coder service. The feature enables developers to convert an address into a latitude/longitude. PlaceFinder also works in reverse (aptly called a reverse geo-coder), changing lat-long coordinates into a physical address. Idea for check-in services, PlaceFinder currently powers popular applications including FourSquare.

The other geo-related service is Yahoo's PlaceSpotter API (formerly PlaceMaker) which now allows developers to add location awareness to content. Since most content has meaningful geographical information, using the API developers will be able to extract that rich data and provide another layer of meaningful geo-data on top of it. For example, read an article about one restaurant, and through the PlaceSpotter API, developers can recommend places in the same neighborhood.

Adcenter Rebrands as Bing Ads

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:25:00 GMT

Bing announced a name change for its Microsoft adCenter, the tool advertisers use to manage their search-based ads on the Yahoo!/Bing Network. But if you've been following adCenter changes the past six months, you know that it's much more than a name change alone.

In the official announcement, Bing touted several new features which should indicate that not only is it ready for prime time, but that it has its sights set clearly on Google and is singularly focused on providing a better experience for those managing ad campaigns on the network.

In the past few months, Bing’s list of improvements is impressive and include a new Web interface, improved ad rotation controls, and agency enablement tools for those managing multiple accounts.
The Yahoo! Bing Network is comprised of 151 million unique searchers in the U.S. who are likely to spend 24% more than the average searcher, and likely to spend 5% more than Google searchers in the U.S.*.

* Source: US, comScore Core Search (custom), June 2012

URL by Match Type in adCenter & Yahoo!

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Advertisers running search campaigns on Bing and Yahoo have a new feature at their disposal - custom URLs by Match Type.

The capability provides advertisers with greater control and visiblity into match type performance, enabling advertisers to include a unique destination URL for each keyword match type within the same ad group.

Before the introduction of URL by Match Type, a keyword could represent any and all of the match types for a given keyword in the same ad group. For the keyword "car" for example, advertiser might pay $3.00 for an exact bid, $1.50 for a phrase bid, and $2.00 for a broad bid - and have to use the same URL for all. But now, advertisers are able to manage each destination URL by the match type independently. In short, all keyword and match types combinations are unique.

The improvement provides a better user experience when advertisers are working on both adCenter and GoogleAdwords as it eliminates the need for workarounds and familiates more complet and acurrate campaign data imports.

Alibaba Buys Itself Back from Yahoo

Michael Garrity — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:00:00 GMT

It seems that Facebook doesn’t get all of this week's press when it comes to major tech companies and deals that go for billion-dollar figures. At least not as long as Yahoo and Alibaba have something to say about it.

Yahoo is tying up some loose ends with Alibaba, in which the company has owned a 40-percent stake for some time.

Alibaba will be buying back half of Yahoo’s stake in the company, and it’s going to cost them $7.1 billion. Yahoo is going to receive $6.3 billion in cash and as much as $800 million in preferred stock. The company initially bought the 40-percent stake for $1 billion in 2005.

This deal values Alibaba somewhere between $30 and $35 billion, meaning an IPO could also be somewhere in the not-too-distant future for the Chinese e-commerce company.

Genome Maps Out Targeted Data for Advertisers

Michael Garrity — Thu, 17 May 2012 04:00:00 GMT

Late last year, Yahoo purchased ad targeting and optimization software provider Interclick with hopes to improve its advertisement targeting capabilities. Yesterday, the company announced that it was finally starting to put the platform to use.

That announcement was the Genome platform, an online advertising solution that will combine Yahoo user data with third-party data from Interclick and first-party data from advertisers, plus a premium media footprint that allows marketers to access Yahoo’s inventory of guaranteed and non-guaranteed premium ads; all of this is designed to give marketers a complete, custom audience solution.

The new advertising solution ties together technology, data, analytics and media from Yahoo and Interclick, utilizing Yahoo’s premium media and vast collection of user data in conjunction with Interclick’s unified technology stack, third-party data partnerships and audience and analytics expertise.

Genome will leverage data to improve an advertisers return on investment (ROI), provide actionable insights relevant to campaign objectives and meet industry challenges, including data proliferation, technology fragmentation and outdated planning and buying techniques. Marketers will be able to easily organize and navigate the data ecosystem to build brand value and increase conversions and revenue.

Yahoo is presenting Genome as the culmination of its display ad agreement with Microsoft and AOL, as well as its purchase of Interclick, to offer an audience buying solution with best-in-class targeting and personalization capabilities.

The company anticipates that Genome will be available in July.

Yahoo Gets Serious with its Marketing Dashboard

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:59:00 GMT

Yahoo, yes Yahoo, has launched a tool for businesses to obtain a "consolidated picture" of marketing results and reputation. Is this the first step in Yahoo!'s return?

Using the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, small business owners can monitor their search engine and directory listings and receive recommendations on new opportunities on over 100 sites and monitor their online reputation on up to 8,000 digital sources (including Facebook and Twitter). The dashboard also offers users access to site traffic analysis reports, integrating data from Yahoo Merchant Solutions and Google Analytics. Yahoo is also offering up a way for SMB users of the marketing dashboard to integration with other services - notably email service provider Constant Contact and local internet marketing solution OrangeSoda.

“We created the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard to help small business owners who feel overwhelmed by online marketing options and monitoring a wide range of sites and social networks to keep up with customer feedback,” said Shannon Parker Hane, Director of Product Marketing, Yahoo! Small Business. “Now, within a single tool customers can conveniently evaluate their marketing options, campaign results and online reputation without having to search across the Web for information.”

While I believe there are stronger unified software services for monitoring and managing search and social, it's good to see the company moving in what I believe to be the right direction. The Yahoo Marketing Dashboard requires businesses to list within the Yahoo Small Business, but based on some of the features offered out of the virtual box, that's a small price to pay for use of the free service.

Bing's Search Share is Movin' on Up

Michael Garrity — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:00:00 GMT

Yahoo's search influence may be waning, but it seems to be all good news for Bing.

In under three years, the Microsoft-owned Bing, which actually powers Yahoo Search, crept up to almost tie Yahoo's share of the search engine market. Comparatively, Yahoo has been in the search game since 1995.

comScore officially reported last week that Bing now has 15 percent of the search engine market, a statistic that shows pretty impressive growth in the company's short lifespan. Yahoo barely squeaks by in second place with just 15.1 percent of the market.

There are many possible reasons for Bing's climb, including being attached to the Microsoft brand (which provides both recognition from users and integration into various Microsoft products) and Yahoo's recent trend of focusing on projects that decidedly aren't search-related.

Of course, both are still proverbial small potatoes compared to Google, which holds over 65 percent of the market alone.

Yahoo! Wants to Connect You with Offline Consumers, Too

Michael Garrity — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:50:00 GMT

The art of marketing is all about connections, and few relationships are more meaningful (or profitable) than those between a consumer and a marketer. However, running an online marketing campaign is, in many ways, quite different from marketing offline, and for companies trying to market in both spheres, managing connections on and off the Web is a demanding job.

Realizing that all of these relationships are important for business, many companies have focused their efforts on using the Web to track down the most relevant consumers out there.

Yahoo! is looking to get in on the action and help out businesses, and the company has dug deep to combine "cutting-edge science and access to a massive store of consumer data" to develop two new technologies that tie together a business's online and offline worlds. A newly enhanced version of Yahoo!'s Consumer Direct and the introduction of Proximity Match intend to help marketers elicit meaningful results by targeting relevant consumers, by both interest and location.

The new updates to Consumer Direct, the company's purchase-based targeting and measurement solution, include features that let marketers target large, specific consumer segments and measure the impact of their online campaigns on their offline customers by combining in-store purchase data with Yahoo!'s online user data.

Since that takes care of purchasing trend information, that must leave the Proximity Match solution to help target location-based consumers (as if the name didn't give that away). This technology will make it easy for businesses to find potential customers "according to the distance between their home address" and the retail or business location.

"Our rich understanding of online consumer behaviors enables marketers to reach a precise audience that is both receptive to their messages and large enough to drive meaningful results," says Yahoo!

The information provided by both Consumer Direct and Proximity Match is culled from a large stockpile that includes Yahoo!'s own data, advertiser data and data from the company's partners, all of which provides a wide view of consumer behavior and location-based information to help businesses pinpoint the most relevant consumers.

Multichannel Development Platform Simplifies App Creation

Michael Garrity — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:15:00 GMT

Optimizing mobile content is becoming an important issue for Web developers, which presents a need for a product that is able to competently utilize popular existing technologies and deploy a single application across multiple platforms.

This week Yahoo! launched Livestand for the iPad. This product is powered by "an exciting new technology" for Web developers called Yahoo! Cocktails, a mix of HTML5, Node.JS, CSS3, JavaScript and some additions by Yahoo! engineers. Soon, the company is looking to turn over its first two Cocktails, Mojito and Manhattan, to developers so that they, too, can leverage this mix of Web technologies.

For the unfamiliar, Livestand is "a personalized living magazine optimized for the iPad" that is made for users to have a tailor-made content-aggregating experience that promises "beautifully presented articles, photos and videos that bring your favorite topics to life."

In order to create this rich content-consuming experience, Yahoo! turned to some of the most prominent Web technologies available, combining them to form the aptly named Cocktails that support features from a variety of sources. Mojito is an environment-agnostic JavaScript Web application framework; Manhattan is the hosted platform for applications that are based on the Mojito framework.

As a framework, Mojito allows developers to run their apps on both the browser and server sides, meaning there is no need to write different code for the backend and frontend. This does away with issues like Web pages saying that "JavaScript enabled is required," because apps built in the Mojito framework can simply run on the server side on the same code base.

This Cocktail is a unique mix of module, as it is a self-contained package of business logic, and widget, because it appears as a visual element of the UI with which users can interact. By building upon various proven technologies, Mojito is able "to run equally well" on browsers, hybrid native/Web runtime or servers using Node.JS.

Manhattan is the server-side hosting environment run by JavaScript that houses Mojito-based apps that run on Yahoo!'s Cloud. In extending Node.JS, Manhattan is able to provide fault-isolation, fault-tolerance, scalability, availability, security and performance and provides a simple interface for developers to manage and deploy "multiple versions of their Mojito-based applications" using the massive tech infrastructure that belongs to Yahoo!

The current plan is to release Mojito as an open source through the Yahoo! Distribution Network in quarter one of 2012. The company wants the Cocktails to become "one of the leading Web frameworks going forward" so that developers can start creating applications that work well on both browsers and servers.

With the release of these Cocktails, Yahoo! is attempting to establish a unified framework and deployment platform that can create and host almost any necessary Web applications to be run on desktop and mobile browsers. Should the experiment prove to be successful, it could have big ramifications on the future of Web development, especially as users continue to go mobile and developers increasingly need to build comprehensive apps that will work adequately on browsers across mutliple platforms.

Yahoo! & ABC News Form Information Alliance

Michael Garrity — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:35:00 GMT

In a huge announcement made early this morning, two global media powerhouses, Yahoo! and ABC News, revealed that they will be combining their journalistic forces. This unprecedented move could have major ramifications in the news and search industries, potentially forcing other major search engines to establish similar partnerships with news organizations.

Currently, the two companies reach a combined audience of over 100 million people in the United States on PCs and various mobile devices.

This interesting, multifaceted relationship should prove to be a boon for both organizations. Yahoo! will provide a huge, unique and new audience to ABC News, a well-respected and trusted news enterprise with decades of experience.

The biggest part of this "information alliance," in addition to providing far more people with far greater access to news, is that the companies will establish more original news videos online than ever before.

Today saw the launch of GoodMorningAmerica.com on Yahoo!, the official beginning of the partnership. Also debuting today will be the first of three new, online-first video series featuring some of ABC News' most popular anchors and correspondents. The new shows include Newsmakers, which presents online-first video conversations with top ABC anchors, like Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric or Barbara Walters, interviewing "everyone from politicians to global leaders to celebrities." Today's installment, which airs live at 2:35 p.m. ET, features George Stephanopoulos talking with President Obama. No big deal, right?

The two other new shows are Around the World with Christiane Amanpour, which spotlights the internationally-renowned host bringing her special background to light as she explains, contextualizes and analyzes the biggest stories around the world, and This Could Be Big, a show, hosted by Nightline anchor Bill Weir, about future innovations that could drastically alter the world. Other shows will debut in the coming months and throughout 2012.

A headline making announcement like this is bound to really change the way many people around the world get their news. For instance, ABC News will now be Yahoo! News' premier provider, which really alters the makeup of Yahoo! News for its millions of readers. Also, the aforementioned GoodMorningAmerica.com will exist as a co-branded site that offers a wide variety of video and news so that the huge audience of the GMA morning broadcast can engage with the content online before, during and after the show airs.

The two companies will also begin collaborating on news content and co-producing coverage for major events. There will be "integrated bureaus" in the cities of New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.

And lest we forget that there is also money involved, the two enterprises will be creating a suite of premium online video advertising opportunities, as well as new enhanced sponsorships that will allow advertisers to benefit from the unique strengths of each sales organization.

Yahoo!'s recent struggles have been well-noted, so it should be interesting to see how this new partnership affects the company in this period of transition.

The two organizations promise to "deliver the latest breaking news, the biggest exclusives and award-winning investigative journalism from a powerful lineup of journalists -- all with the ability to extend across TV and online like never before."