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Yahoo! is working to reinvent itself from a mere Internet portal to a true multimedia company to regain its lead in web traffic and ad revenue and to win the battle for the search box. Yahoo! was able to emerge virtually unscathed from the dot.com bust, but it is now forced to compete against Google and facing declining profits. In the U.S., Yahoo!'s websites still score more unique visitors than Google's, but is a different story outside of the U.S. There are still positive spots with Yahoo!, assuming it can capitalize immediately on these positives. Yahoo! is still No. 2 in the search market. Search revenue is increasing with the release of its upgraded search marketing system. Outside of search, Yahoo! properties that are competing against Google properties remain on top, such as Yahoo! Finance versus Google Finance and Yahoo! Mail versus Gmail. In off-site ads, Yahoo!'s capability to put ads on other publishers' websites received a boost from its acquisition of online ad exchange Right Media and behavioral marketing network Blue Lithium in summer 2007. In on-site ads, Yahoo! unveiled SmartAds to establish a novel category of display advertising using behavioral targeting methods that resemble the explicitness of search advertising. Yahoo! continues to advance new specialty sites such as the social networking site, Yahoo! Mash, recruiting developers to build applications on its platform, adopting open source technology, and upgrading existing sites, which are all part of its reinvention plan.
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