Yahoo's number of unique users rose last year but the amount of time spent dropped by 10 percent. Facebook's time spent increased by 79 percent and Facebook also boasts some of the most loyal users in the business.
In class we talked about another possible positioning for Yahoo being extending the 'My Yahoo' concept and this week the Wall Street Journal this week (February 7th) reports that Yahoo is seeking to beef up the site's personalized content, particularly for mobile iPhone and Android applications, creating online mobile magazines unique to each user. Will this approach work?
3 comments:
Going mobile is definitely the right thing to do for Yahoo. Having a Yahoo app previously installed on phones will definitely help increase traffic, but they still need to work on their content. As we can see from the article, Yahoo's problem is not attracting new users, but it's retaining those users. Their new personalized content should help retain many of them, but of course now they have AOL to worry about as well. It will be interesting to see AOL's approach to news and how they compete with Yahoo. Will definitely be keeping up with this story to see how this all pans out.
I agree with DineNDash. Going mobile will help Yahoo differentiate, but it is not enough. For what purpose will people use Yahoo apps? Why would I choose to install a Yahoo app over other news sources like CNN or Fox?
To pull users away from such competitors, Yahoo must seriously rethink not just the presentation of news, but the content of the news.
On the other hand, Yahoo's mobile efforts may work better if it focused on services that do not already have a high market saturation. One such service might be Instant Messaging (IM).
I have yet to find a fantastic free mobile app for IM. Perhaps if Yahoo released a fantastic Yahoo! Messenger app, it could attract and retain more users and gain profit from ad revenue. It would be even better if Yahoo also considered partnering with other services like Skype so that it can create one app that can manage multiple IM and Web 2.0 services.
Yahoo might also consider creating a mobile app for its photo sharing service, Flickr. As a designer, I find that Flickr is used more often and generally has more better quality photos than Google's Picasaweb. There might be an opportunity here.
This strategy of sending personalized content to mobile devices based on an individuals preferences is a good one as people obviously want to see news they're interested in.
However, people already visit certain niche websites to get this kind of news or subscribe to emails or RSS feeds of interest.
Therefore it is necessary that Yahoo find other ways to differentiate itself; which will be especially hard after what other news sites have done such as AOLs merging with the very successful Huntington Post.
Perhaps if Yahoo is already pursuing mobile applications, it could work with sites like Foursquare or Twitter to show people news pertaining to where they are at the moment or collaborate with them on awarding more "badges" and points etc.
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