Yahoo Stopping Access Of Facebook And Google

Reuters is reporting that Yahoo Inc will stop letting consumers access its various online services, including Fantasy Sports and photo-sharing site Flickr, by signing-in with their Facebook Inc orGoogle Inc credentials.

The change, which will be rolled out gradually according to a Yahoo spokeswoman, will require users to register for a Yahoo ID in order to use any of the Internet portal's services.

The move marks the latest change to Yahoo by Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who is striving to spark fresh interest in the company's Web products and to revive its stagnant revenue.

"Yahoo is continually working on improving the user experience," the company said in a statement, noting that the new process "will allow us to offer the best personalized experience to everyone".

The first Yahoo service to require the new sign-in process is Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick'Em, a service focused on the NCAA college basketball tournament which begins later this month. News of the change to Yahoo's Tourney Pick'Em sign-in process was first reported by the technology blog Betanews.

Since Mayer took the reins in 2012, the company has rolled out new versions of many of its key products, including Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance. Last year, Yahoo announced a program to recycle inactive Yahoo user IDs, letting new users claim email addresses that have not been used for more than 12 months.

In eliminating the Facebook and Google sign-in features, Mayer, a former Google executive, is effectively reversing a strategy that Yahoo adopted in 2010 and 2011 under then CEO Carol Bartz.

The change to the Tourney Pick'Em sign-in process began on Monday, the Yahoo spokeswoman said, noting that users could still access other services with Google or Facebook IDs.

The sign-in buttons for Facebook and Google will eventually be removed from all Yahoo properties, the Yahoo spokeswoman, though she declined to provide a timeframe.

YouTube Overtakes Facebook Among Teens

Todd Wasserman of Mashable.com reports that after months of speculation, Facebook last week acknowledged that there was some decrease in the number of "younger teens" using the social network on a daily basis. Now an annual survey of 4,014 young people provides more proof that teens may be looking elsewhere.

The Futures Company, a research consultancy, interviewed teens in July and found that 41.6% of those aged 12 to 15 said Facebook was their favorite website compared to 48% of teens overall. Last year, Facebook was the most popular site among 12- to 15-year-olds.

The most popular site among all teens now is YouTube, according to the report. Fifty percent of teens surveyed cited YouTube as their favorite site versus 45.2% for Facebook. (The company's report, the 2013 TRU Youth Monitor, has not yet been released, but Mashable got a sneak peek at the data.)

Others on the list include Amazon (27.8%), Google (25%), Twitter (19.5%), Yahoo (12.1%), eBay (10.7%) and Tumblr (12.3%). Note: The survey asked respondents to list their favorite five websites, so the figures don't add up to 100%.

Facebook is still the most popular website with twentysomethings at 55%, followed by Amazon (37.5%). The report shows modest growth for Twitter among the 12 to 29 group with 16.5% naming it as their favorite website vs. 14.1% last year. Facebook's overall numbers went from 57.6% to 51.7%.

"Our new findings do suggest some weakness for Facebook, but I need to preface everything we discuss here with the fact that Facebook remains the favorite website overall among our sample of 12- to 29-year-olds," says Rob Callender, director of youth insights at the Futures Co. "That said, Facebook achieves that distinction thanks to twenty-somethings."

Digging deeper, just 18.3% of teens aged 12 to 15 agreed with the statement "I'm addicted to Facebook," versus 30.5% of twentysomethings. "This suggests parental controls aren't the issue. Rather," says Callender, "it appears Facebook might not be creating as many new fanatics as it once did."

One caveat: Asking about "favorite websites" may skew the results in an age when mobile use is becoming the norm. However, Callender says that 4,000 is a more than adequate sample size to determine meaningful results.

If so, the data among 12- to 15-year-olds could be a troubling sign for Facebook. Slackening usage among younger teens isn't a good trend for the site. The company's admission of slowed growth in that age set led to a drop in the company's stock price after an otherwise stellar third quarter. As Callender notes, "This heightens the possibility that we may be looking at a changing of the guard."

Yahoo And Google Are Both Spending Big Money On Acquisition Sprees And What That Says About Their Futures

The link to the full story is here

These days it seems as if a startup so much as glances in Marissa Mayer’s direction, it can expect a bid within 24 hours. There’s been a lot of buzz about Yahoo’s new role as an acquisition hound of late, and Mayer’s attempts to turn the beleaguered giant into a mobile-first company and energize its ranks with young, acqui-hired talent.

But Yahoo isn’t alone in its pursuit of “serial acquirer” status. Highlighted by its blockbuster acquisition of Waze last month, Google has quietly snapped up a cadre of companies as well — and has spent a pretty penny doing it. In its “10-Q” filing with the SEC on Thursday, Google revealed that it spent $1.3 billion on acquisitions during the first half of 2013, with $966 million of that total going to Waze.

While reports had varied on the final purchase price, according to the filing, the acquisition of Waze was “for a total cash consideration of $966 million,” with “$847 million attributed to goodwill and $188 million attributed to intangible assets,” minus the $69 million in other net liabilities assumed from Waze’s books. Though the final number is subject to change, it’s now abundantly clear just how hungry Google was to beef up its social mapping data and prevent it from falling into the hands of its competitors.

On top of its new social mapping prize, Google has made another 15 acquisitions so far this year, shelling out $344 million in additional assets to buy companies like Wavii, Makani Power, Channel Intelligence and DNNresearch. Channel Intelligence represented the largest deal of the batch, with Google paying $125 million to continue its charge on the eCommerce front as well.

With Wavii going for an estimated $30 million and 13 companies still accounted for, we can deduce that Google, like Yahoo, has also been making its fair share of small-ticket acqui-hires over the year. In fact, Google acquired 53 companies in 2012, chief of which was Motorola Mobility at a price tag of $12.5 billion. The rest of its acquisitions cost $1.1 billion.

Notably, Google was in the midst of carrying out this M&A strategy when Marissa Mayer left the company to become CEO of Yahoo, and it’s clearly one that she’s now using to shore up Yahoo’s weaknesses. Yahoo spent most of 2012 wrapped up in internal struggles and attempted board takeovers. Compared to Google’s 53 acquisitions in 2012, Yahoo only made two — both of which took place only after Mayer had taken over.

Since Mayer took the reins last summer, Yahoo has accelerated its acquisition strategy exponentially, making a whopping 18 acquisitions. And, while that’s mind-boggling enough as it is, Yahoo is likely far from calling it quits. As my colleague Alex Wilhelm recently pointed out, Mayer actually has plenty of runway. Thanks to its stake in Alibaba, Yahoo has an ace up its sleeve that’s potentially worth tens of billion of dollars and which can continue to fuel its aggressive M&A strategy.

For many reasons, this is critical if Mayer is to have any shot at turning the ship around. If Yahoo really wants to strengthen its position in mobile and revamp its aging video and media technology, the company has to continue going after outside talent.

SIMILAR APPROACH TO M&A, DIFFERENT STORIES

While Yahoo and Google are both making headlines for the slew of acquisitions they’ve made over the past year — and the money they’re spending to do it — this shared approach says very different things about what each company perceives as its greatest need (read: deficiency). Yahoo’s biggest problem, at least in the short term, is PR.

In other words, when Mayer took the helm, Yahoo has been spinning in circles for years. They were directionless and basically seen as a has-been company that had lost its relevance in the modern tech industry. By acqui-hiring young talent, Mayer is showing that she’s eager to return Yahoo to its former standing and regain its luster — in part, by make it attractive to younger entrepreneurs but also by updating its product to make Yahoo a destination for younger people in general.

Its billion-dollar acquisition of Tumblr is a prime example: Tumblr’s core user base consists of young people, teenagers and middleschoolers. So not only was Tumblr an opportunity to make Yahoo seem like a cool company for young people and generate more traffic, but it also allows Yahoo to play to its strength, leveraging its ad network to monetize Tumblr’s massive content silo.

Mayer’s approach to M&A is also proving that the company is eager to fix its lagging mail, search and news tools, which have been gathering dust and have been eclipsed by the likes of Google and Microsoft.

Some of these problems will be easy for Yahoo to address and fix in the short term, but they could also create more issues for the company over the long-term. Yahoo is attempting to make a litany of significant, structural changes all at once, making it tough to achieve any kind of real cohesion across its products. It may do wonders for the stock, but it could easily end up being an ad hoc, duct-tape-style solution that leaves the real, infrastructural dangers roiling beneath the surface.

In contrast, it’s taken years for Google to achieve any sort of cohesion across its own disparate products and projects. But its recently embarked on a new, “One Google Era,” in which the company has begun to prioritize collaboration and unification across its properties, which, in turn, gives more meaning to both its M&A and product strategies.

Google’s acquisition of Waze, for example, allows it to add a social layer to its existing mapping and navigation products, strengthening an already formidable arsenal of mobile properties, rather than, in Yahoo’s case, allowing it to start from square one.

Google is now focused on becoming a big data empire and adding pieces that will help it power its massive cloud services infrastructure and products that are decidedly focused on real time. This applies across its diverse properties, whether that’s to allow people to collaborate and communicate in real time through Hangouts, Docs or Gmail, search in real time or navigate in real time through Google Maps and Waze.

Going forward, Google will begin looking more to acquire and build products that will prepare it for increasingly direct competition with companies like Amazon. One place that Google has been struggling of late is in its e-commerce and shopping, where its ambitions haven’t been met with the usual rewards or dominance it’s come to expect from its ventures into search, mobile and advertising.

For example, while Google’s dominance in search remains, when it comes to discovery and engagement around products, Amazon has been leaving it in the dust. If Larry Page’s mission is for Google to use its real-time infrastructure to create utilities that are critical to their everyday lives — whether in communication or otherwise — falling behind in product marketplaces is a big problem.

That’s likely why Google is working to boost its marketplace ambitions with products like the rumored “Helpouts,” which could help find a real home for its mobile payment products, like Wallet, and communication product like Hangouts to power real-time commerce. Amazon and eBay have been busy tearing down the walls that stand in the way of buying and selling on the web. Now Google wants to join the fun, and tools like Helpouts point towards a future in which Google may begin acquiring the kind of talent that can help it to build a real marketplace on top of search and other core products

Yahoo News Gets A Makeover, But The Bigger Improvements Are Under The Hood

The link to the full story is here

A little over a month after Yahoo partnered with Twitter to beef up its homepage news feed with relevant tweets from news organizations, the company is today announcing a major makeover for one of its flagship properties, Yahoo News. The updated Yahoo News site is has been redesigned with a more modern look and feel, to better fit in with Yahoo homepage’s new look, introduced earlier this year. But the bigger improvements are the less visible ones.

At the time of the homepage revamp, Yahoo said that the most notable change was not the homepage’s appearance, but rather its increased emphasis on personalization. The same, apparently, holds true for the new Yahoo News site. Although at first glance, users will just notice its cleaner, less dated look, the focus here again is on personalization.

The news stream is now customizable, so users can tell the site what kind of news they’re interested in seeing. You’ll notice that every story now has an “X” next it when you hover over it, and when clicked you can indicate why you don’t want to hear more about that story in more detail by clicking the topics associated with that particular news item.

For example, after clicking the “X” over a story about the Hernandez homicide investigation, the message reads “show me fewer stories about” and then provides a list of choices including “sports & recreation,” “football,” “Aaron Hernandez,” “National Football League,” or “New England.” Even if you don’t drill down into one of those choices, after clicking the “X” the story will become hidden from the news feed in a few moments.

Though seemingly a minor thing, the fact that Yahoo News is pulling out the major subjects involved in a news story like this indicates there’s some more serious technology under the hood, like semantics. We saw Yahoo use similar customization and personalization techniques when it debuted a new Yahoo iOS app in April, which took advantage of Yahoo’s $30 million acquisition of news summarization startup Summly. The app also allows users to select topics that interest them, as well as flag those that do not – choices that are synced across platforms when users are logged in with their Yahoo IDs.

As with the homepage update, where the site adapts to learn users’ preferences as they click, the new Yahoo News will also learn of your interests based on the stories you click through to read, even if you never explicitly tell it to stop showing you items by clicking the “X.”

The updated News site is also described as faster and better organized, so you can more easily click to the categories of interest like “science,” “politics,” “health,” etc. It now features Yahoo partner content like ABC News more prominently, as well.

The redesign is also arriving on iOS devices, and soon on Android, too. The roll out is starting now for U.S. users, and will complete in a couple of days.

Yahoo Partners With Twitter To Further Personalize Homepage Newsfeed

The link to the full story is here

Yahoo and Twitter have partnered to bring tweets directly into Yahoo homepage’s newsfeed on web and mobile, the company announced this morning. The move follows the February relaunch of the front page. At the time, the company debuted a redesigned site with an increased emphasis on personalization, as well as a more modern design.

The Twitter partnership expands upon this earlier mission involving personalization – a key focus for Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer – noting that Yahoo will now ”seamlessly include relevant and personalized tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and our other sources.”

These tweets will now appear directly in the Yahoo news feed, which offers an endlessly scrollable stream of content, divided into sections like “All Stories,” “News,” “Local,” “Entertainment,” “Sports” and more. The headlines that come from Twitter accounts will be indicated by referencing the source by its Twitter handle (e.g. “@ABCWorldNews” as opposed to “ABC News”) and there will be “Follow” buttons to the right of the stories, allowing users to click to add the news organization to their Twitter feeds.

“Updates direct from politicians, celebrities, media outlets, and other publishers have become an important source of real-time news and information,” Mayer explained in the official announcement today. “140 characters can connect athletes with their fans, capture live chatter from the red carpet, and inspire global debate.”

Though the post did not detail how the addition of tweets specifically ties into Yahoo’s overarching personalization goals, that refers directly to changes that took place following the homepage revamp earlier this year. The front page’s selection of news articles now starts out as a generic grouping of stories, but as users click on content that interests them, the site adapts. The more it learns about a user’s interests, the more relevant and personalized the surfaced stories become. (At least in theory). This technology will now also apply to the tweets.

Yahoo has been moving to reinvent itself under Mayer’s leadership, gobbling up startups, paring down its scattered lineup and launching well-received apps like a revamped Flickr and its new Weather app for iOS, the latter of which may be one of the highest rated iPhone applications we’ve seen, with 4,206 5-star reviews out of 4,832 ratings.

It’s worth noting, too, that the revamped Twitter-powered homepage has a mobile component as well. The update is rolling out to U.S. desktop and mobile users over the next few days, the company says.

Yahoo: Expect Ads On Tumblr To Ramp Up Significantly In 2014

The link to the full story is here

After announcing its deal to acquire Tumblrfor $1.1 billion, mostly in cash, Yahoo today started to lay out some of the details for how it intends to make use of the property while trying to stick to its promise “not to screw it up.” Expect more advertising by next year as well as more Tumblr content on Yahoo properties, but more of a cautious step as to how Yahoo will deal with some of Tumblr’s more NSFW content.

Here are some of the more interesting details revealed in the call:

What are Tumblr ads going to look like?Tumblr apparently made only $13 million in revenues last year but CEO David Karp apparently thinks the site is “ready” to make more now that it understands its users, according to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. But she also noted that they will be working from a challenged position, not just because of user resistance but because Karp himself has been “skeptical” about online ads.

In the conference call, Mayer made an early reference to how Tumblr would be able to make good use of Yahoo’s advertising technology, in ways that fit Tumblr’s so-far successful, image-based, quick-blogging, youth-oriented format — what she called “native advertising formats.”

As one example, she pointed to an ad format that Yahoo launched at the end of April, in-stream ads that it runs on its news pages. “On Tumblr we feel we can monetize in ways that are meaningful and add to user experience,” she said. She cited the Tumblr dashboard, or as she called it, the inbox for the blogs you follow. “Today Tumblr already does some ads in that feed. We would like to look at that and understand how to introduce more ads where the ads fit the expectations and follow that form and function.” She also noted that Yahoo may possibly work with bloggers to provide ads that will be run with their permission.

On top of this, expect to see more search ads: there are also plans to integrate Yahoo’s search functionality into the site as well. “We think there is a complelling search story,” said Mayer. “Their body is 50b posts and 5 billion posts of original content so search is already vast. We see an opportunity to integrate with search and provide that. That’s one area we are excited by the acquisition.”

Throughout this, a focus on trying to be Tumblr-centric about whatever Yahoo tries to do there. “It’s not a choice between creativity and monetization,” insisted Mayer.

So when are those ads coming? CFO Ken Goldman said that ad revenues from Tumblr will be “modest” this year — the acquisition is not expected to close until the second of of 2013 — but that they will “ramp up” in 2014 “and beyond.” “We do think those revenues will start monetizing materially [and] will contribute to revevenues in 2014 and beyond,” he said on the call, “not just standalone for Tumblr but also incrementally, helping Yahoo to growth.”

Porn? The NSFW, notorious part of Tumblr was never referred to by name, but an analyst did ask about what Yahoo, while courting mainstream brands to market to that attractive Tumblr audience, would do about content that is not “brand safe”. “The richness and breadth of the content… is what makes it more exciting,” enthused Mayer. “In terms of addressing concerns around brand safety we need to have good tools for retargeting.” [Another acquisition, methinks? In any case, no outright announcement that Yahoo intends to get rid of all those sites that Tumblr has more or less accepted into the fold.]

Mayer continued: “Tumblr is now at the point that they do know what it is and what makes sense to monetize in way that is tasteful.” She also mentioned due diligence but also something else, effectively implying that Yahoo will figure out a way of getting around the NSFW content and serving ads where they want them to go, because that’s what the advertisers want: “There are a lot of marketers eager to participate in Tumblr platform and the demographics,” she said.

What does the $1.1 billion “substantially in cash” mean? Goldman noted that it’s effectively an all-cash deal, save for some shares in Yahoo for David Karp. He also noted that Yahoo still has “ample cash” for more acquisitions and investments, to the tune of about $6.2 billion. These will not likely be along the lines of Tumblr in terms of size. “This is an exceptional company and team,” she said of Tumblr. At 300 million monthly unique users, Yahoo is paying about $3.67 per user for the acquisition.

Complementary properties. Mayer made a lot of the fact that Tumblr and Yahoo actually fit “really beautifully together,” like South America and Africa, in her words. In addition to Yahoo skewing older and Tumblr skewing younger, “We are strong on sports, finance and news; Tumblr’s strong on architeture, travel and fashion. We need great tools for content publishing and creation. They have them. Tumblr prides itself as a home for brands. Yahoo is all about brands.”

Tumblr comes to Yahoo. While a lot of the expectation so far has been about how Yahoo may mess up or spiff up or monetize up Tumblr, another theme that emerged during the call was the idea of Tumblr content going out to Yahoo properties — a way of attracting users to Yahoo that may not have gone there before.

“Our strategy is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” said Mayer. “There are some who will always prefer Tumblr and will never come to Yahoo. [But] as we pull Tumblr content into our news feed and media experiences it will cause them to become that much more interesting and richer and will cause more to come to Yahoo. I imagine engagement will improve as we incorporate that content.”

Flickr. There is a separate news conference today that will likely concentrate on updates to Flickr, but today Mayer appeared to douse out speculation that it will be a move to begin integrating its online photo site with Tumblr in any way: “In terms of how the content of Tumblr evolves it depends on the creators,” Mayer said in answer to a question of what this acquisition will mean for Flickr. “It’s something that we will turn our attention to in the future. It will provide great storage, but we will see how those two cousins should relate to each other.

It’s Official: Yahoo Is Buying Tumblr For $1.1B, Vows To Keep It Independent

The link to the full story is here

Yahoo has now officially confirmed that it is buying blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion mostly in cash, after reports on an impending deal first surfaced last week. It says it will keep it as an independent company, with founder David Karp at the helm as CEO. “The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators,” it writes.

The deal will close in the second half of this year.

With a lot of negative comments coming in from Tumblr users in lead-up to the deal, and some competitors claiming that they’re witnessing a kind of exodus from Tumblr as a result, Karp has also weighed in with his own announcement about the deal, emphasizing the same independence line: “We’re not turning purple,” he wrote:

“We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve – certainly isn’t changing.”

Karp also points out that Tumblr, joining up with the “original Internet company,” will be getting more resources to create the “ultimate creative canvas.” Some users have complained about certain features around the site, such as how video works, so the implication here is that areas like this will be addressed faster from now on, but — again — in a way that “doesn’t compromise the community and product we love.”

To get into the spirit of things, Marissa Mayer has fired up her very own Tumblr account and has posted on the news herself, complete with her own GIF to commemorate the deal (and, yes, also respond to the negativity):

Although both Karp and Mayer are pushing hard on the “we will not screw this up” line, there are of course business reasons behind it.

The deal, as many have pointed out, will give Yahoo not just access to more younger users (Tumblr is strongest in the 18-24 age bracket), but a fast-growing number of consumers who are in general very engaged online. Yahoo notes that Tumblr currently has 300 million monthly unique visitors and is growing by 120,000 signups every day, “one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world” with 900 posts per second and 24 billion minutes spent on site each month. There is also a strong mobile story that fits with Yahoo’s new emphasis on that platform: more than half of Tumblr’s mobile users using the mobile app on an average of 7 sessions per day.

Yahoo says it expects Tumblr to expand Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by approximately 20%.

That’s presuming there will be advertising against all of that content and all of those users. While Yahoo and Tumblr say that we won’t be seeing the birth of Yahooblr here, it’s also careful to note that advertising and Yahoo’s other monetizing services will most certainly be finding a place at Tumblr.

Tumblr, it appears, will be using Yahoo’s “personalization technology” and search infrastructure in its services to help users find content that fits their interests better. This is directly connected to advertising: “In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences,” Yahoo writes. Still, these apparently won’t be standard Yahoo display ads like the ones we see everywhere else: “The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.”

Tumblr has been working on services like this for some time, for example with its Spotlight highlighting Tumblrs from brands. This last year helped the company make some $13 million in revenues — not much by Yahoo standards. It will be interesting to see whether Yahoo will be able to raise that figure without lowering the others around usage that attracted it to Tumblr in the first place.

The companies are holding a conference call at 9am Eastern time; we’ll be listening in and updating from that.

Yahoo! Signs Global, Non-Exclusive Display Ad Deal With Google

The link to the full story is here



As first reported by AllThingsD, Yahoo has announced an advertising partnership with Google, not unlike working relationships it has with other companies. Yahoo in its current form has quite a few pages for advertising display and it makes sense that its CEO of less than a year, Marissa Mayer, would call on her former colleagues in Mountain View to fill those spots with Google’s contextual ad units.

As we navigate the web, both on desktop and mobile, we’re used to seeing Google’s display ads, and they do very well. Mayer has insight into how those ads perform, so this is basically a no-brainer for Yahoo. Mayer was employee No. 20 at Google, and has been able to see its Ad product mature over the years.

Here’s what the company shared about the agreement today:

Every day, people turn to Yahoo! for their daily habits — like search, weather, news or more. At Yahoo!, we’re focused on doing everything we can to make the user experience inspiring and engaging. One way we do that is by providing relevant and well-targeted content — whether that be editorial or advertising content.

Say you’ve been shopping for boots. If you see an ad for boots, that’s instantly going to pique your attention more than an ad for, say, a car battery. That’s better for users. This is why contextual advertising is such a powerful tool.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we recently signed a global, non-exclusive agreement with Google to display ads on various Yahoo! properties and certain co-branded sites using Google’s AdSense for Content and Google’s AdMob services.

By adding Google to our list of world-class contextual ads partners, we’ll be able to expand our network, which means we can serve users with ads that are even more meaningful.

For our users, there won’t be a noticeable difference in how or where ads appear. More options simply mean greater flexibility. We look forward to working with all of our contextual ads partners to ensure we’re delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time.

Yahoo's big move to mobile: Little to report just yet

The link to the full story is here



When she grabbed the mic for her first quarterly earnings call as Yahoo's CEO last October, Marissa Mayer told listeners that she would ultimately move one-half of the company's engineers to assignments working on mobile. That was how vital she saw mobile to the company's future.
A lot of investors got understandably excited. After years of musical chairs at the top, finally there was a new boss who "got it." This proverbial platform change was something that could help return the pizzazz to Yahoo. Mobile could pave the way for Yahoo to use search and personalization in new ways and take advantage of a formidable stock of daily content. The company's stock reflected that new-found optimism, increasing in value some 30 percent since Mayer took over last fall. But expectations may have hopscotched ahead of reality. One takeaway from today's earnings conference call was that Mayer doesn't yet have much to point to in terms of results. At least not just yet.
"There's a little bit of the shift to mobile affecting us there, but mobile usage is pretty incremental and additive to the experience," Mayer said after Yahoo posted slightly better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings.
To be sure, she did not signal any deviation from the mobile strategy articulated earlier. In fact, Mayer made a point of offering props to Yahoo developers for coming up with a new Flicker iOS app, categorizing their work as "a huge win for Yahoo and our passionate users." She said the release of the new iOS app had helped contribute to a 25 percent increase in the number of photos "uploaded, viewed, and shared on a daily basis."
But that would be the only meaningful hard number about mobile offered during the course of an hour-long Q&A session. Asked about metrics for mobile, she demurred.