Yahoo to launch personalized mobile content platform

February 09, 2011

Yahoo to launch personalized mobile content platform

It looks like Yahoo views mobile media as a possible solution to its recent struggles. On Feb. 6, the New York Times reported that at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Yahoo plans to announce a new mobile publishing platform which would make it easier for users to get personalized content on cell phones and other mobile devices.

Here’s why news organizations should watch this move…

Yahoo is not offering details about the project prior to the official announcement. However, according to the Times:

“The Yahoo platform aims to draw from a user’s declared preferences, search items, social media and other sources to find and highlight the most relevant content, according to the people familiar with the matter. It will be available on Yahoo’s web site, but is optimized to work as an app on tablets and smartphones, and especially on Google Android and Apple devices.

“The project, initially named ‘Deadeye,’ has been the focus of a team of more than 50 engineers for the last several months. The company is also planning to work with outside publishers, like Hearst, to create third-party apps powered by the same software engine, they said.”

On the personalization front, Mobile Marketing Watch notes: “Although Yahoo! hasn’t enjoyed many shining moments of innovation in recent years, the company has experienced considerable success with its personalization efforts, particularly with regard to its homepage tweaks. As a result, Yahoo! is believed to be heavily banking on a major push toward greater personalized content.”

What in this for news orgs? If Yahoo’s platform works well and becomes popular, it could become a useful distribution channel for news publishers.

It’s likely that Yahoo will serve ads via this platform. What’s unknown so far is whether content publishers might be able to either serve their own ads along with their content, or get a percentage of Yahoo’s revenue for ads served with their content. Since the platform apparently aims to provide full content (not just teasers with links) to users, Yahoo would probably get pressure to strike some kind of ad-related deal with publishers.

Another open question is how well this platform will really work for non-smart “feature phones,” which according to new figures from ComScore still comprise a the vast majority (nearly three-fourths) of the current US mobile market.

Many (perhaps most) feature phones currently in use are capable of web browsing or even running simple javascript-based apps. But so far, news organizations generally have neglected to offer feature phone users a good mobile web experience.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s mobile offerings (including Yahoo News) are often listed by wireless carriers in the main menus of their feature phones’ browsers—so Yahoo apparently already understands the importance of reaching this huge consumer market.

Feature phone users are especially likely to desire content personalization, given the difficulty of navigating and searching web sites from those devices. If this Yahoo platform makes that easier for consumers, and if Yahoo offers some fair revenue opportunities for news publishers, then a platform like this might be a useful complement to a news organization’s own direct mobile offerings.

The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By Amy Gahran, 02/09/11 at 7:44 am
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Tags: mobile, business models, platforms, personalization