Yahoo! Unveils Mobile Developer Suite

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Feb 24, 2015

Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO, Financial) unveiled its new Yahoo! Mobile Development Suite. This suite combines Search In Apps, Yahoo! App Publishing for monetization and App Marketing with its Flurry Analytics acquisition done last year. It is said that this suite will expand the company's advertising reach. This is a huge piece of the company's plan to prove their competitive advantage on the mobile front.

Looking back

Yahoo! is an American MNC which has its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. The company provides services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers, etc. It is known worldwide for its web portal, the Yahoo! search engine. The company was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo. The net income for 2014 was 7.52 billion. The company's assets in 2014 was valued at U.S. $9.6 billion and total equity was U.S. $38.74 billion.

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Yahoo’s Mobile Development Suite

At Yahoo!'s first mobile developers conference, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer unveiled the new developer site during the presentation that went on for three hours. This suite offers a wide array of mobile tools so as to monetize, publish and track mobile advertising. A few of them are mentioned below:

  • Yahoo! Publishing App: It's main function is to monetize your app with video ads from Yahoo!, BrightRoll or Flurry advertisers
  • Flurry Analytics: Its main function is to provide free insights from the mobile app analytical tool
  • Yahoo! search app: To help Yahoo! users as well as monetization
  • Yahoo! Marketing App: To help advertisers reach their target audience. The Yahoo! App Publishing and Yahoo! App Marketing helps to leverage BrightRoll and Gemini advertising platforms. Gemini is a combination of native, video and social advertising.
  • Flurry Pulse: Is software development kit (SDK) that enables developers to share Flurry's insight's with partners easily.

Yahoo! revealed statistics during the presentation which showed that mobile consumers spent around 2.2 billion hours on Flurry-developed apps.The unveiling of this app should come as no surprise as Marissa Mayer played with mobile apps. It looks like her gambling decisions finally paid off. The company generated around $1.2 billion in 2014, only in the mobile-related field. This high revenue enabled the company to be positioned third amongst its competitors in the industry, according to a study by comScore The first position was Google Inc. (GOOG, Financial) followed by Microsoft Corporation (MSFT, Financial) at the second place. According to this study, Google was the leader in the search market with 64.4% market share in 2014.

Microsoft was second with a market share of 19.7%. Yahoo! sites followed by 13% market share. This is a significant improvement over last months' share of 12%. Ask Network accounted for 1% while AOL, Inc. (AOL, Financial) Accounted for 1.1% explicit core search. Yahoo!'s 1% increase is due to Mozilla's Firefox browser adopting Yahoo! as the default search engine. Mozilla Firefox had featured Google as its default search engine for over ten years. Yahoo shares rose during the CEO presentation at $44.17, traded up 1.1% from earlier at $44.13

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Flurry has around 200,000 app developers who have worked tirelessly to build 630,000 apps that reach 1.6 billion devices. Yahoo! has employed more than five hundred mobile developers. This is almost 10 times more than the number of developers that were employed a few years ago. A quarter of Yahoo!'s income is now from mobile revenue and mobile economy is around $3.3 trillion a year.

Road ahead

Now that Yahoo! has entered the mobile market, the company will have to face stiff competition from Microsoft, Facebook (FB, Financial) and other online advertising giants. Out of Yahoo's total 1 billion viewers, 575 million are mobile users. This may help Yahoo! increase its overall position. Since the time of it's inception, the company has seen the worst, gone through ups and downs. Finally, the ray of hope is shining brightly.